No central authority is responsible for Bitcoin. No CEO, board of stakeholders, or holding company. What marks one of the powerful characteristics of Bitcoin is that its creator(s) is no longer a participant of this network.
There are thousands of validators around the world to validate the correctness of the bitcoin blockchain and to store a complete history of bitcoin transactions. These validators are called full nodes.
Miners from all over the world are competing to produce blocks. These blocks are validated by full nodes. The software used to run these full nodes is written by Bitcoin developers. Of course, most of the transactions in these blocks are initiated by users from exchanges, wallets or payment processors. All these participants are critical to the operation of Bitcoin and its network, but they have no way to control Bitcoin.
Therefore, any change in Bitcoin needs to be agreed upon. In this sense, the Bitcoin governance model is similar to a democratic system with checks and balances. Miners act like the executive branch of the government, dealing with day-to-day operations and enforcing the rules; developers behave like the legislative branch, enacting and passing new laws; and users that run full nodes client are the judicial department, ensuring that the other two departments do not do anything unconstitutional.
The modern world is filled with complex systems and equipment that people do not completely understand but trust fully. Medical care is provided to those who are not a doctor. The weather forecast is published to those who do not understand meteorology. Laptops are used by people who are not electrical engineers. World travelers do not need to understand aerodynamics to fly in the air through commercial airlines.
However, it must be better understood to believe in a new currency system because this type of trust is often abused. History has witnessed too many examples. Eventually using and trusting Bitcoin should not require additional scientific knowledge or specialty. Receiving Bitcoin should be as simple as receiving an email. Those who are interested in Bitcoin should do due diligence. There are already a lot of useful materials on the internet that can help you make sense of this including Bitcoin core code, books, websites, and podcasts.
