Governance: what can change, and who decides
You will be able to say which rules no vote can touch, how a rule that is allowed to change actually changes, and who holds that influence today.
Fixed by design
Some rules have no procedure for changing them.
The cap of twenty-one million, the emission schedule, balances and genesis sit outside anything that could be called governance. The protocol declares that no monetary governance exists and rejects a change to any of them outright, instead of routing it to a vote. There is no DAO and no premint to administer. A rule that cannot be amended cannot be captured, and that is the intent.
Neither coins nor stake vote
Holding more does not buy you the rules.
Two constants in the protocol say it directly: token voting does not control the protocol, and stake voting does not control the protocol. Validators stake to signal agreement about the tip, as the mining course explains, but a larger stake does not let anyone redefine what a valid block is. Wealth can buy VIGI; it cannot buy the definition of VIGI.
How a rule does change
By release, by activation height, and by each node choosing to run it.
Rules that are allowed to evolve, such as a new consensus feature or a stronger signature scheme, enter through an activation schedule that belongs to consensus itself: its commitment is part of the state every block commits to, and no node's local configuration can switch a rule on or off. A change that breaks compatibility must ship in software operators install before its height arrives. Nobody can push it onto a node remotely; a node that declines keeps the old rules and parts company with the nodes that upgraded.
Who holds the pen today
One team writes the software, and this lesson says so.
Today the node is written by UTXO Labs and published as signed binaries. The Core source is private; the public repository carries the launchers, the verification policy and the release key. That is a concentration of influence, and it is stated here rather than dressed up as community governance. What bounds it is everything this course has described: monetary rules with no amendment path, releases you can verify yourself, independent audits of the code, and operators who decide what they run.
In short
- Supply, emission, balances and genesis have no amendment procedure: there is no monetary governance.
- Neither holding VIGI nor staking it gives any control over the protocol.
- Rules that may evolve activate through a schedule committed in consensus and software each operator chooses to run.
- UTXO Labs writes the node today; the source is private and every release is signed and verifiable.
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