I use to explain it this way: nowadays, bits and bytes are everywhere, most everybody you know has a notion of what a `megabyte` is. But this is a shockingly recent idea.
My grandma was 20 when a guy named Claude Shannon in 1949 invented/popularized the concept of a "bit" and described what information is, the way Newton described matter and how to model physics with mathematics.
Really, "information" was a just vague concept until Shannon and this was just 70 years ago!!1
It's only natural that a lack of generations of craftsmanship in this industry makes it pretty low quality/hard to master. On the other hand, imagination is the limiting reagent, since (arguably) the bottleneck is good ideas, specially with all these decades of Moore's law.
The article is fairly low-quality. It's more focused on fear-mongering around the perils of machine-judges and trying to make a headline around "if there's someone with commit power then in the end, it's not a decentralized system".
It makes a number of errors, most notably, calling the hashing power spent on securing the network "donations" (quotation marks sic).
Bitcoin has one job: securing the network of transactions.
Bitcoin is a mechanism to aggregate hashing power in order to make it possible to semi-objectively measure the risk of a block being reverted, in fact, this is the only formula in bitcoin's white-paper.
The paper examines a system of economic incentives, and somehow dismiss its key activity as an altruistic "donation". The article goes downhill from this statement onwards, and I couldn't feel like it makes a huge (yet ineffective) effort of deconstructing Bitcoin's governance model.
Some quotes that reinforce the superficial understanding of the Author:
> There are times, however, when two miners can find the
correct nonce for a new block within a few seconds of each other and both broadcast their valid block of transactions (nigh on) simultaneously to the network. This causes a split, or fork, where miners go ‘rushing off’ to mine on top of two competing blocks. Because this form of divergence is endemic
to the blockchain’s mechanics it is referred to here as a systematic fork; the discrepancy should be quickly resolved by network mechanisms (this happens, on average, two or three times a week). Systematic forks are temporary glitches...
These forks are essential to maintaining decentralization as a mechanism to make the network secure: trust the info, not the people that delivered the data, trust the signing mechanism (hash power spent), not the people running the machines.
> Furthermore, the political strategy of a user activated soft fork still requires code developers to create a client that reflects the political will of the market and thus demands the obligatory passage point of a Lead Developer found in version control systems.
Not true -- the UASF measures were not merged into the Bitcoin Core branch. Some code was merged to protect users from potentially problematic interactions with Bitcoin Cash fork.
Modeling Bitcoin's governance system is a daunting task. The author essentially confuses the power developers have with regards to miners: developers know there are things that would never fly with miners, and miners are way more powerful than what is described in the paper.
Source: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=14914487445955020...