[zenogais]

So the interesting thing here is the "majority assent" phrase. All the polls I saw included < 15% of Ethereum stakeholders / hashing power. Some included < 5%, but were taking by many (who already had a chosen outcome in mind) as definitive proof of community preference.

Really this shows that a small group of people plus a core team already leaning in one direction are probably enough to fork the network.

[DennisP]

Once we passed the fork block, we had a vote by 100% of the mining power.

The ether vote had the percentages you mentioned, but all elections are decided by the people who show up. Generally we consider elections fair if everyone has the opportunity to vote; whether they actually do is up to them.

[dnautics]

that's fine. Those figures just say that many people are ok with whatever. Ultimately: If you don't like it, then you can leave. And if you aren't paying attention, then, well, you obviously don't care enough about that asset.

[zenogais]

There we go, just wanted you to backpeddle on this "majority" thing.

[PeterisP]

As the parent poster said, there was a majority consent. Much more than 50% considered that this was okay, they also "joined the fork", so the things that these <15% did were done with majority not objecting.

And also it's quite plausible that if the same number of people, the same people would implement a technically identical hard fork with the same process but with a different "socioeconomic" result and justification, then they wouldn't have gotten the same majority consent that they did in this case.