Seems it's only decentralized to a degree. Go to the Bitcoin Foundation website, they say they want to keep Bitcoin decentralized. So how much influence does this Bitcoin Foundation have over the future of Bitcoin? No idea. There's only one (unpaid) Bitcoin developer responsible for the whole thing? Sounds like a tremendous responsibility for one person, considering what's potentially at risk. How are changes rolled out, how are changes vetted and to what degree are new changes a threat to Bitcoin's supposed ideals?
Whoever who convinces 50+% of the miners to adopt their version of the software wins.
The core developers can commit code and make releases that do whatever they want, but if they e.g. tried to pay all transaction fees to themselves, miners wouldn't install the new version and someone would fork the project.
How much control does any open source developer have over the projects they work on? Linus seems to have pretty tight control over Linux, but if he started messing up, he'd lose his position pretty fast. Likewise, the developers have a lot of control, as long as they are effective and behave well.
If a bunch of miners decide to change the protocol but the majority of users stayed on the old protocol then those miners would be mining a worthless (or at least less valuable) fork of the blockchain.
How many of the miners know how to evaluate updates? Most of these miners I read about, they bought some expensive hardware and just plugged it in. Is there some evaluation period before updates go live? Also, what if a seemingly innocuous change has unforeseen consequences? Nothing like Bitcoin has ever existed.
So far, changes seem to happen fairly slowly. Things are discussed ahead of time. Some kinds of changes are proposed ahead of time in the form of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) -- https://github.com/bitcoin/bips. Even tiny changes, that seem entirely reasonable to me, can generate controversy. Core developers ask each other to acknowledge each pull request.
If the developers tried to push something through that many miners wouldn't like, I'm confident people would notice and it would cause a large outcry.
> Seemingly innocuous changes can indeed have unforseen consequences.
The core Bitcoin developers seem conservative, reasonable, skilled, and they test things quite heavily. That said, changes are risky, and they've caused problems in the past. Bitcoin is risky!
