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The Capture, an investigation into how informal power over Bitcoin Core was assembled, exercised, and defended by Hodlanot, March 27th, 2026.

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Article 1 of 4, The Network.

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This is Bugle journalist, Rudy Dazzleworth.

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Welcome to the first episode of Pleb Slot Pulitzer Prize Pieces.

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In the autumn of 2025, something very unusual happened on Bitcoin's network.

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Bitcoin Knotts, an alternative implementation of Bitcoin's node software,

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maintained by longtime developer Luke Dascher,

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surged from around 2% of the network to more than 20% in a matter of months.

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Thousands of people who had been running Bitcoin Core,

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the dominant implementation for the protocol's entire history, made the switch.

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The trigger was a decision by Bitcoin core maintainer Gloria Zhao to merge a change,

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relaxing the default limits on how much non-financial data could be embedded in OP underscore return outputs

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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

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as a dumping ground for data, like inscriptions,

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at the expense of its function as a monetary network.

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Supporters argued it reflected market reality

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and that opposing it was a form of censorship.

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The word censorship appeared in a public letter defending the change,

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signed by 31 Bitcoin Core contributors.

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What the public debate mostly missed was the origin story.

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How did Gloria Zhao become the person who merged that change?

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How did Bitcoin Core, a project with no company, no CEO, no formal hierarchy,

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come to be directed in practice by a small and unusually cohesive group?

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This investigation, across four articles, documents how that happened,

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How a network was built, how it was used, how its influence was encoded into the protocol's governance infrastructure,

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and what the consequences were when that influence was exercised at scale.

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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

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The dinner.

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Bitcoin Optech is a technical newsletter and education resource for Bitcoin developers.

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Founded in 2018, it publishes weekly summaries of development activity, runs workshops, and organizes occasional dinners for contributors.

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It is a respectable institution in the Bitcoin world.

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Low profile, practically useful, trusted.

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One of its co-founders is John Newbery.

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Newbery is an English software engineer who became an active Bitcoin core contributor in the mid-2000s.

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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.

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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

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had become the primary formal pipeline into Bitcoin Core. He co-organized Chaincode's residency

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program alongside its CEO, Adam Jonas. He ran the Bitcoin Core PR Review Club, a weekly session for

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mentoring contributors through the review process, and he ran the Optech dinners. Optech was not

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self-funded. Its seed capital came from three individuals. Wences Casares, the founder of Zappo,

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John Pfeffer, a venture capitalist, and Alex Morkos, co-founder of ChainCode Labs itself.

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Two years later, Casares and Pfeffer would provide Brink's founding sponsorship.

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The same private funders financed the network's technical education arm and its developer funding arm in sequence.

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Steve Lee, an Optech co-founder, described its political function explicitly.