Michael Saylor: The biggest challenge facing Bitcoin in the future is not external competition, but the erosion of its consensus rules from within.

Michael Saylor, founder of Strategy, said Bitcoin has already gained market recognition, but its biggest future challenge is not external competition, but the erosion of its consensus rules from within. He views Bitcoin’s consensus rules as a "constitution" governing property rights, scarcity, settlement mechanisms and power boundaries, and any act of modifying the rules for the benefit of specific groups is a violation of all participants’ economic rights and interests. Saylor warned that Bitcoin is poised to grow 100-fold and become the infrastructure of global capital markets, while a wrong rule modification could harm future markets, technologies and economic freedoms yet to emerge. He singled out proposals including BIP-110, arguing they essentially undermine Bitcoin’s protocol neutrality by restricting valid paid transactions, introducing contractual mechanisms or expanding block size. These proposals, despite varying forms, will all weaken block space scarcity, increase network bandwidth and verification costs, expand protocol complexity, and bring new security risks. Meanwhile, weakening the fee market will affect miners’ revenue sources after successive block reward halvings, further undermining the long-term security of the Bitcoin network. Additionally, once an interest group can modify Bitcoin’s rules through certain means, other groups will follow suit, leading to prolonged conflicts in protocol governance, capital outflows, slowed innovation and deteriorated network security. Saylor called for keeping Bitcoin’s base layer simple, neutral, scarce and secure, leaving innovation to the second layer and application layer, and driving development through voluntary adoption rather than frequent modifications to the underlying protocol. He stressed that protocol upgrades should be extremely cautious, advanced only when truly necessary, to safeguard the foundation for Bitcoin’s long-term development.