0:00Rudy Dazleworth The capture, an investigation into how informal power over Bitcoin core was assembled, exercised, and defended by Hodlonaut, 03/27/2026. Article one of four, the network.

0:17Rudy Dazleworth This is bugle journalist, Rudy Dazleworth. Welcome to the first episode of Plebslop Pulitzer Prize Pieces. In the autumn of twenty twenty five, something very unusual happened on Bitcoin's network. Bitcoin knots, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin's node software maintained by longtime developer, Luke Dastier,

0:40Rudy Dazleworth surged from around 2% of the network to more than 20% in a matter of months. Thousands of people who had been running Bitcoin Core, the dominant implementation for the protocol's entire history, made the switch. The trigger was a decision by Bitcoin Core maintainer, Gloria Zhao, to merge a change, relaxing the default limits on how much nonfinancial data could be embedded in o p underscore return outputs before a Bitcoin transaction would become nonstandard from the point of view of mempool relay policies. Critics argued it would legitimize and accelerate the use of Bitcoin's blockchain as a dumping ground for data, like inscriptions,

1:20Rudy Dazleworth at the expense of its function as a monetary network. Supporters argued it reflected market reality and that opposing it was a form of censorship. The word censorship appeared in a public letter defending the change, signed by 31 Bitcoin core contributors. What the public debate mostly missed was the origin story.

1:42Rudy Dazleworth How did Gloria Zhao become the person who merged that change? How did Bitcoin Core, a project with no company, no CEO, no formal hierarchy, come to be directed in practice by a small and unusually cohesive group. This investigation

2:00Rudy Dazleworth across four articles documents how that happened, how a network was built, how it was used, how its influence was encoded into the protocol's governance infrastructure, and what the consequences were when that influence was exercised at scale. This first article covers the foundation, the people, the institutions,

2:21Rudy Dazleworth and the sequence of decisions that assembled the network between 2018 and 2021. It begins with a dinner. The dinner. Bitcoin OPTECH is a technical newsletter and education resource for Bitcoin developers founded in 2018.

2:39Rudy Dazleworth It publishes weekly summaries of development activity, runs workshops, and organizes occasional dinners for contributors. It is a respectable institution in the Bitcoin world. Low profile,

2:52Rudy Dazleworth practically useful, trusted. One of its cofounders is John Newbery. Newbery is an English software engineer who became an active Bitcoin core contributor in the mid two thousands. He is widely described, including by people who later fell out with him, as technically sharp,

3:12Rudy Dazleworth personally warm, and effective at navigating the social dynamics of a leaderless open source project. By late twenty twenty, he had accumulated a set of institutional levers that few people in open source software outside corporate structures possess. He was a cofounder

3:32Rudy Dazleworth of Brink, one of the main organizations funding Bitcoin core developers. He was closely affiliated with Chaincode Labs, the New York based developer training program that had become the primary formal pipeline into Bitcoin Core. He co organized Chaincode's residency program alongside its CEO, Adam Jonas. He ran the Bitcoin Core PR review club, a weekly session for mentoring contributors through the review process,

4:00Rudy Dazleworth and he ran the Optech dinners. OpTek was not self funded. Its seed capital came from three individuals, Wences Casares, the founder of Zappo, John Pfeffer, a venture capitalist, and Alex Morcos,

4:15Rudy Dazleworth cofounder of Chaincode Labs itself. Two years later, Casares and Pfeffer would provide Brink's founding sponsorship. The same private funders financed the network's technical education arm and its developer funding arm in sequence. Steve Lee, an OpTech cofounder, described its political function explicitly.

4:38Rod Palmer Hey, folks. If you would like to listen to the full article read by Rudy Dazleworth, please subscribe to the Bugle Weekly on Fountain.