A few “leading figures” have huge influence over bccy.  Vitalik, CZ, Armstrong etc. When they take a position on some important issue, they can block a proposed change.  I think this is similar to c++ standardization being a decentralized process. Big companies influence the process while individuals have basically no voice.

Instead of one government in control of a fiat currency, a bccy is largely controlled by a few big companies[bccy exchanges, ETF exchanges,,].

— governance of open source codebase

Q: who exercise control over linux kernel codebase?
A: it’s not by counting votes. It’s mostly controlled by the creator. Counting votes is very prone to manipulation. I don’t know about BTC or Ethereum codebases, but presumably similar.

In the big picture, there’s always some /governance/ in any open source codebase. When programmers disagree, they fork the codebase. So the Ethereum codebase could be forked thousands of times a year, but perhaps only a few forks had a following.

cryptos are supposed to remove the central authority (like a government), replaced with the network consensus mechanism. However, the software is still controlled by an elite group of programmers.

Some say that the BTC algorithm is unbiased and not subject to market forces. I am suspicious. Programmers are humans and market players.

Eth TheMerge in Sep 2022 .. was centrally coordinated, by a small number of code committers.