No. The "They" that did the fork only managed to do it because there was a majority consensus agreement to switch to the forked chain. If the majority refused to follow, there forked chain would have died or become a thing for the minority. Just like EthPOW vs ETH POS.
Seriously, why is it that every discussion about crypto has the same bullshit talking points? Do you guys have a list of "standard basic list of BS arguments that I will throw at the discussion just to see it sticks"? Is it ignorance? Is it malice?
> The "They" that did the fork only managed to do it because there was a majority consensus agreement to switch to the forked chain.
A majority you may not agree with. So you’re still at the mercy of external entities, contradicting your original point.
> Seriously, why is it that every discussion about crypto has the same bullshit talking points?
Because proponents keep repeating the same debunked invalid talking points. Like saying anything they disagree with is FUD. That expression has become the Godwin’s law of blockchain discussions: it doesn’t advance the conversation, it’s just shorthand for “I angrily disagree with you”.
> So you’re still at the mercy of external entities
The people that didn't agree with the "DAO fork" continued on the original chain. None of them were forced to follow the majority. This is a huge important difference.
> None of them were forced to follow the majority. This is a huge important difference.
Quite the contrary, it’s a meaningless difference. Most systems have that feature.
Imagine everyone in your friends circle uses Signal. Then they decide to change to WhatsApp but you and one other refuse to do so. No one forces you to follow the majority, you simply deal with the consequences of not doing so. For example, you may have less of a voice in the decision of where to go to dinner together because you're not part of the main conversation.
You are (once again?) changing the actors and the power relationships between them and pretending it doesn't matter.
It's one thing to have "your friends" moving from one network to another. It's a completely different thing to have a network where there is an owner who can kick you out unilaterally.
None of the people that are using Ethereum Classic are disallowed to ever use ETH if they so want. They haven't been censored to continue participating in that network. It's just that to participate they must accept that the consensus of truth has changed.
Don't attribute to malice what could simply be ignorance. Right now, people need to pit in some serious time (upwards of 100 hours minimum) learning about true decentralized open technologies like bitcoin, so I think uninformed ignorance is far more likely than malice in almost all cases... unless the uninformed person stands to profit from his or her ignorance.
I'm not sure Ethereum is anywhere near as decentralized and bitcoin, because the Ethereum foundation and the large stakeholders (now that they have the miners the boot) appear to wield a huge amount of power.
The most likely reason almost all of hackernews wants to do nothing but make fun of crypto and the people involved is they just don't understand it.
If only they invested the 100+ hours learning it like we did then maybe they would understand its value. I mean thats the only option - either its uninformed ignorance (which we think) or actual malice. There can't be a third option.
The thing I don't understand is the concept "majority" in the crypto space. There is no way to prove that one person doesn't control the majority of the voting power.
If I own a large portion of the supply split across several hundred wallets and I vote one way, smaller owners may be influenced by the appearance of hundreds of votes being cast one way vs the other. We see this in the real world, where some people are willing to just vote for what they think is the majority sentiment when they don't have strong opinions on a matter.
I've heard arguments along the lines of "those with more invested into the project should have more voting power" but that to me just sounds like an incentive to centralize.
If I'm a small player, I either go with the majority or see my investment become worthless, or in a fantasy world where crypto is used for anything other than wild speculation, I see my utility greatly diminished as I'm no longer able to interact with the "majority". Sure, I might still be able to interact with those left behind, but the pressure to move over to the majority fork is going to pull more and more people towards that.
I see federation of content as a much more approachable means to re-decentralization of the internet.
We still rely on centralized DNS. As we still rely on ISPs to make sure our packets can leave our local networks, and on international treaties to make sure we can communicate with networks in other countries, but unless you want everyone to start developing and maintaining a decentralized physical computer network for free, we'll always need to trust a number of institutions to do this thing where we can communicate with someone on the other side of the world within a few milliseconds.
Voting has nothing to with the consensus mechanisms to determine who is allowed to choose what block is appended to the chain. Why are you bringing up "voting" into the discussion here?
Noone is out to get you. The world is not trying to "FUD" their way to your own demise.
Its just... noone wants to hear people hawking their pedo pesos constantly and how "WEB3 (powered by pedo pesos) will help us all!".
Its tiring. I'm over it. Most of us are. We wish you no ill will or harm, heck most of us hope you all wake up, but in the meantime we don't want to hear it.
I think “They” once forked Ethereum to prevent DAO losses.