The Capture, an investigation into how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled, exercised, and defended by Hodlanot, March 27th, 2026.
Article 1 of 4, The Network.
This is Bugle journalist, Rudy Dazzleworth.
Welcome to the first episode of Pleb Slot Pulitzer Prize Pieces.
In the autumn of 2025, something very unusual happened on Bitcoin's network.
Bitcoin Knotts, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin's node software,
maintained by longtime developer Luke Dascher,
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 non-financial data could be embedded in OP underscore return outputs
before a Bitcoin transaction would become non from the point of view of mempool relay policies Critics argued it would legitimize and accelerate the use of Bitcoin blockchain
as a dumping ground for data, like inscriptions,
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.
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, 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 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, 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, practically useful, trusted.
One of its co-founders is John Newbery.
Newbery is an English software engineer who became an active Bitcoin core contributor in the mid-2000s.
He is widely described, including by people who later fell out with him, as technically sharp, personally warm, and effective at navigating the social dynamics of a leaderless, open-source project.
By late 2020 he had accumulated a set of institutional levers that few people in open software outside corporate structures possess He was a co of Brink one of the main organizations funding Bitcoin Core developers He was closely affiliated with Chaincode Labs the New York 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, and he ran the Optech dinners. Optech was not
self-funded. Its seed capital came from three individuals. Wences Casares, the founder of Zappo,
John Pfeffer, a venture capitalist, and Alex Morkos, co-founder 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 co-founder, described its political function explicitly.