Bitcoin decision making is channeled down a funnel: Core Developers make suggestions and the Lead Developer (and those given commit access) sign off on those decisions. Those decisions are then voted for by miners who are (relatively) centralised in that roughly 5 mining pool companies control the vast majority of hashing power used to vote on those decisions. Meanwhile large wallet/exchange companies who control vast amounts of on-chain transactions can lobby miners to pick certain decisions by upgrading their nodes to reflect new rules (miners will want to follow large companies because they create liquidity for coins with the new rules and so they can sell their coins more easily and, theoretically, for a higher value). So while this is still a decentralised systems because multiple parties have a say, there are still lots of points of centralised control in the governance system. In other words, not everyone is equal. "Individual developers submit to those with commit access, individual miners submit to mining pool operators, and everyday users submit to Bitcoin companies" (478). The Lead Developer acts as a centralised decision maker, mining pools act like centralised voters, and Bitcoin companies act like centralised lobbyers. So there is a certain structure to Bitcoin governance.

This is not an accurate model of how bitcoin works. :(

Not at all.

Can you explain what's wrong with it?

It's difficult to do an analysis of a paper I cannot access, so my response was related to your description.

I talk some about why people who write Bitcoin software don't control anything this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978934

Hi Greg, I'd be happy to send you a copy and would appreciate your input. My email can be found on my staff profile: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/adjunct_research...

Holders of Bitcoin also have a say in what forks are viable.

Holders of bitcoin are the only people who don't have a say. Buyers, miners and developers decide what is and is not viable (in roughly that order). Holders have a say only as much as they are still buyers.

How do you sell a fork if you aren’t holding it first?

By creating the fork on demand. The only part of Bitcoin that is technically hard to recreate from scratch is the huge hashing power of its mining network.

If buyers were happy with bitcoin-but-a-different-brand then there isn't much existing bitcoin holders can do to hold their market together. There is an unlimited supply of numbers out there, the constraint is numbers that are backed by whatever silly number of hashes per second the Bitcoin network is up to. The holders don't have any particular influence over that constraint.

I think we may not be understanding each other.

From the article abstract, it appears that this paper is more about how the governance behind modifying the bitcoin code itself is hierarchical, and not the separate but dependent issue of mining power for the current protocol being concentrated in relatively few hands:

"The overall political framework for altering the Bitcoin code is described as senatorial governance: a (de)centralized model of bureaucratic parties who compete to change the monetary policy (codified rules) of the protocol. This model shows how Bitcoin is not an autonomous system but is assembled and maintained via human discretion."