Bitcoin: The Skyscraper with Six Maintenance Workers

Picture Manhattan’s skyline: a glimmering empire of sand, steel, concrete, mortar, caulk, glass and code. Somewhere among those numinous towers, one structure stands higher than the rest — the Bitcoin Building.

Its foundations are bulletproof cryptography, its lobby guarded by mathematical keys and locks. From the street, it looks unshakable. But climb higher, and one notices something strange: only six janitors hold the same version of a master key.

Each janitor lives under fluorescent lights, somewhere in the jurisdiction of a three-letter agency. What is the trilogy? Margin Call, The Big Short and what?

They patch cracks, create more holes, fix wiring, rewire, keep the elevator cables humming. The tenants — miners, nodes, idealists — trust that these quiet custodians won’t be coerced into “routine maintenance” that subtly rewires or alpha rewrites the system. What about church numerals, lisp and lambda calculus?

Here is a metonymy: The skyscraper isn’t corrupt, the keys are visible.

The Bitcoin codebase sprawls like the city grid below — four hundred thousand lines of geopolymer logic. Touch one beam, and a neighboring penthouse trembles. Every renovation risks knocking out power to fifteen blocks like block caving Apache Stringhold in Oak Flats. No one architect sees the entire blueprint; each just maintains their own floor, assuming the others do the same without a care in the world about a sink hole a hundred miles away.

The central vulnerability isn’t in the concrete but in the coordination — in the janitorial hierarchy. The city’s zoning laws (protocol rules) assumed adversarial tenants, but not adversarial maintenance.

So reformers propose decentralizing the skyline: Shorter, simpler towers (codebase simplification). Competing developers across districts (jurisdictional diversity). Anonymous architects working from basements instead of glass offices (privacy as resilience). Nodes that don’t just rent space in the skyscraper but own their own black stones, black dots, black rocks (a sovereign operation).

The irony is architectural: in trying to build the perfect tower, Bitcoin forgot the lesson of the city. Complexity is gravity — and the higher it climbs, the more pressure accumulates at the base. The problem isn’t the steel; it’s the handful of humans holding the wrenches.