The rules of the contract are decided and renegotiated continuously on the social layer – the bitcoin protocol automates them.
Bitcoin, the computer network, comes into existence when many people run bitcoin implementations following the [same rules](http://www.2minutebitcoin.org/blog/saylor-series-the-rise-of-man-through-the-stone-and-iron-ages-episode-1-2020).
This distributed social contract practically rules out any controversial changes which could never get a broad social consensus.
It makes Bitcoin resilient to bad changes but open to good, obvious incremental improvements.
*- an excerpt from the 2-minute version of Unpacking Bitcoin’s Social Contract (2018), originally posted in* [*http://www.2minutebitcoin.org/blog/unpacking-bitcoins-social-contract-2018*](http://www.2minutebitcoin.org/blog/unpacking-bitcoins-social-contract-2018)
How would this social contract respond to an emergency change for fixing a serious bug?
The response was very slow when [CVE-2018-17144](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2018/09/20/notice/) happened