[jedunnigan]

Philosophical inquiry doesn't necessitate an adjudication on morality, politics or regulatory climate. It can simply be a formalization of concepts observed in a system.

Bitcoin doesn't exist without human input, it requires active agents to engage it. So even if the rules are set in the code there is an element of humanity embedded in the protocol. Just look at the core developers. I can guarantee you they have a philosophy on what should and should not be done during maintenance and major upgrades to the protocol.

But if you want to reduce the definition of philosophy to those things you mentioned, I'm happy to rephrase: the philosophy of Bitcoin is thus that there is no philosophy. Think of it this way: if you have a rule that says you have no rules, you still have one rule that there are no rules.

[colordrops]

You are begging the question. The design of Bitcoin has a philosophy. The instantiation of Bitcoin, the Bitcoin network itself, does not. Saying that bitcoin has a philosophy because the developers have a philosophy is like saying that air has a philosophy because the developers breath air. No matter what the developers do, the Bitcoin network will continue to exist on its own and act in an exacting way, despite your claims to the contrary. The miners are in control of the network, and not the developers. But no single miner is in control either. If the developers or miners could freely enact change on the network, then there would be a fuzzy line between the design and the implementation, and you could lay the philosophy on the implementation. But interestingly, of all technologies ever created by man, the bitcoin design and implementation may be the most decoupled in history, as bitcoin is built to be resilient to tampering. It is not a representative democracy. Until someone controls hashing power over a certain percentage, or the majority of miners agree to a serious protocol modification, no real change will occur to the bitcoin network's behavior.

From another angle, would you say that a car engine has a philosophy? No. But the designers had a philosophy when they designed it.

edit: Further analogizing with human designed artifacts, such as a towel or a laptop, I think this is a debate on semantics. An object can't have a philosophy, but it can embody or reflect one.

[jedunnigan]

No, you have missed the essence of my post. Technology doesn't pick a side. I'm not arguing against that.

In the relationship between Bitcoin and it's users/developers/miners/nodes there are of course the ideologies of each individual interacting with the protocol (libertarian, anarchist, etc...). Then of course there is the protocol itself. Then you can step back and look at the whole set of individuals each having their own (potentially hostile) philosophies, but still interacting with the protocol in the same way (i.e., they are following the rules) to achieve distributed consensus. How do you categorize that phenomena (embedded was the wrong word choice)? That is the question that I was referring to with the comment "philosophy of Bitcoin."

Now, let's address some points in your post.

>If the developers or miners could freely enact change on the network, then there would be a fuzzy line between the design and the implementation, and you could lay the philosophy on the implementation.

Not one miner is in control? The two largest pools (Discus, ANT) are both located in China. Ghash just shut down it's cloud mining to take back control of the hashing power because of low prices.

Eligius, a pool known for extending the will of Luke Jr. (submits to Bitcoin Core frequently) can change IsStandard to exclude OP_RETURN or Mastercoin transactions or whatever else. That is emergent behavior that is a result of someone's will.

Blockstream has a handful of core devs and many influential minds in the space on their team to work on sidechains. Who knows what that will end up causing? Maybe a split in allegiances and a hard fork? You give Bitcoin more credit then is due. It still requires human input, after all.

edit: we are arguing different points here, let's leave it at that.