According to @Excellion, Bitcoin’s core design has been set in stone since version 0.1 and Core contributors should be viewed as node software developers rather than protocol designers, citing Satoshi Nakamoto’s statement to that effect (source: @Excellion on X, Sep 12, 2025; source: Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcointalk, 2010). For traders, this points to a low probability of base-layer rule changes affecting issuance or consensus, with Bitcoin’s fixed supply and halving schedule documented in developer materials (source: Bitcoin.org Developer Guide; source: Bitcoin Core documentation). Recent upgrades such as Taproot were activated via backward-compatible soft forks, underscoring a conservative L1 change process that limits protocol governance risk (source: BIP341 and BIP342; source: Bitcoin Core release notes).