On the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong corrected the governor of the Banque de France on a fundamental point about Bitcoin's architecture: Bitcoin has no issuer and functions as a truly decentralized protocol that is not dependent on any single entity. François Villeroy de Galhau's remark that he trusts "independent central banks (...) more than private issuers of #bitcoin" revealed a conceptual blind spot - one that goes deeper than mere semantics and points to a larger problem in the traditional financial world.
This exchange is symptomatic of an "old growth sector" that, despite decades of experience in the #geldpolitik Bitcoin does not look at its own technological foundations. In Bitcoin's architecture, miners are not issuers: Their function in distributing the coins does not allow them to set the rules. Bitcoin is a network secured by cryptographic consensus, whose rules are public, verifiable and immutable - by design. To confuse it with a privately issued claim reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual innovation of the protocol.
The reluctance (or inability?) of some high-level decision-makers or otherwise savvy commentators to acknowledge this technological difference reflects not only regulatory caution, but also a gap in the conceptual foundation. Bitcoin therefore represents a break with the gold standard monetary order because it embeds independent verification in the source code rather than relying on discretionary policy. When influential voices equate decentralization with private issuance, or view the technology with suspicion for that reason, it stifles constructive engagement and substantive policy work. (Author: Jérémy Le Bescont, Editorial Manager at CoinShares)
