Jack Dorsey has become extravagantly rich from his run with Twitter.
This is a well known fact as Jack himself tends to publicize about his funding grants to various organizations.
In the last few years, his organization initially founded to support bitcoin core development monetarily, spiral.xyz, has become the most major source of funding for bitcoin developers and related events.
The majority of the developers pushing updates for bitcoin core are now directly funded by Jack Dorsey through Spiral.
More recently, some of these Dorsey funded developers openly declared they'll now be running bitcoin development as a lobby. Founding an invite-only bitcoin core developer group by the name of coredev.tech. They even have the nerve to openly announce that
invitations are only extended to ideologically aligned developers.
Here's where it gets nasty though:
The upcoming bitcoin core update, so called "Core 30", has already merged some changes that directly benefit Jack Dorsey's corporations.
For one, Square already entered big in the mining game in 2021 by investing 5 million USD:
https://decrypt.co/72930/square-teams-with-blockstream-for-solar-powered-bitcoin-mining-farmJack Dorsey has also invested in chip manufacturing and claims to want to fundamentally change bitcoin:
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/jack-dorseys-block-inc-reveals-potential-upgrade-on-industry-standard-bitcoin-mining-rigs/Well, what better way to instate your own will on an open source project than to directly place your favorite people on top of it?
Jack's vision of bitcoin seems to be full of off-chain transactions. Where he'll be a major player of permissioned "bitcoin payments" through his company. Obviously bitcoin's blockchain is the only way to create truly immutable transactions taking advantage of bitcoin's decentralized infrastructure. But sadly, this can't be monetized. But if the only viable way to transact BTC becomes through permissioned layer 2s like the ones Dorsey is trying to promote, they would have successfully managed to monetize bitcoin for just existing.
Jack was hopeful of also dominating chip manufacturing and even tried to cozy up with the Trump administration touting "American made chips". Thankfully the Trump admin hasn't bought into this fraud (yet).
What could be done from now to prevent this?
If you're a miner ask your pool if they're going to support Core 30. If there's no response, switch to a pool that clearly won't support this craziness.
If you run a node, you can symbolically run bitcoin Knots as an alternative. Mining is what makes a difference so keep in mind that node running is just symbolic.
Funding is not governance. Bitcoin Core changes land only after public review, test coverage, and multiple ACKs from independent reviewers. Maintainers cannot merge consensus changes unilaterally, and miners cannot change your node's rules. If a proposal would alter consensus, it is visible months in advance and dies without broad agreement.
Private workshops are not where rules change. People meet in small groups to discuss ideas all the time; the code, tests, and review happen in the open. If someone claims Core 30 has changes that benefit a company, name the PR numbers and we can read them line by line.
Off-chain is optional. Lightning and other L2s are opt-in. They do not replace base layer settlement and cannot force permissioned payments onto anyone who does not choose them. If a company builds on L2, great; if it is permissioned, users will route around it. Chips and mining do not grant protocol control. Cheap hash can affect short-term censorship attempts, but economic nodes still decide validity. Invalid blocks get orphaned no matter who mined them.
Nodes are not symbolic. Running your own validating node is exactly how you refuse unwanted rules and policies. If you prefer Knots or another build, run it. Verify releases, use assumeutxo only if you understand it, and keep your own mempool and policy settings.
Incentive alignment matters. Anyone funding dev work for PR wins today risks losing far more if they degrade Bitcoin's credibility. The market tends to punish short-sighted attempts at capture.
I have watched a bunch of corporate fads try to steer Bitcoin since 2013. The ones that mattered were the ones that wrote good, boring code and earned review. Everything else bounced off the social firewall of users who verify. Keep your keys and your node, and Bitcoin stays user-governed.