Or, maybe, a lot of people read the white paper, and took significant issue with command-and-control style Bitcoin development.

Everything needed to understand the roots of the debate can be found here: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.