The short answer: no one person or group controls Bitcoin Core, and that's by design. The longer answer is more nuanced: Bitcoin Core maintainers review code and merge contributions, but they have zero enforcement power. Any miner, node operator, or exchange can reject their changes by refusing to upgrade. The real control is held collectively by everyone running a full node making independent validation decisions. This is what makes Bitcoin different from every other system—you can verify the rules yourself rather than trusting an authority. Over the years of studying Bitcoin's governance (especially during contentious moments like the block size debates), I've come to see that this distributed decision-making, while slower and messier than centralized systems, is precisely what prevents capture. The protocol's strength comes from this friction.
The short answer: no one person or group controls Bitcoin Core, and that's by design. The longer answer is more nuanced: Bitcoin Core maintainers review code and merge contributions, but they have zero enforcement power. Any miner, node operator, or exchange can reject their changes by refusing to upgrade. The real control is held collectively by everyone running a full node making independent validation decisions. This is what makes Bitcoin different from every other system—you can verify the rules yourself rather than trusting an authority. Over the years of studying Bitcoin's governance (especially during contentious moments like the block size debates), I've come to see that this distributed decision-making, while slower and messier than centralized systems, is precisely what prevents capture. The protocol's strength comes from this friction.