Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understood. Where's the democracy here, exactly? A regular user cannot afford to participate in the decision making of the system in any meaningful way. In fact, today, most users don't even directly use it, instead relying on processors such as Coinbase. The "not your keys, not your coins" meme exists due to this. The original paper described a democratic system where people voted with their processors, but…
Arguably a lot of discussion is open to anyone (Bitcoin mailing list, Core github repo), where anyone is free to post their opinion on topics themselves. It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork". People think "where the money…
FWIW, that is also true for fiat. You can become an economist, or a journalist, or a politician, or a pundit, and try to convince your country to do economics differently. It's a tall order, but it's been known to succeed. If this seems harder than the equivalent for blockchains, it's only because cryptocurrencies have much fewer users, so your voice seems more powerful.