| This was a political and cultural question: is the contract the code? The hard-fork won by arguing that "no, the contract is the code plus whatever a quite small number of greasy nerds decide it will be." If the greasy nerds had instead decided to accept the loss, it would've established a cultural norm so strong that nobody would likely dare to try a fork again. It would have baked it into the community in a nearly indelible manner. "nope, they lost tens of millions and they ate it because the contract is the code, so we won't help you either." Instead, what the nerds did was say "hey, you know the one interesting part of Ethereum? yeah, forget it... because we decided that we value our short-term wealth over the creation of that system." And that's fine. It's fine that they decided they don't give a shit about contracts as code. It's fine that they took their ball and went home. But Ethereum is now dead. Not today mind you, but in the long run. Only a complete and total lunatic will ever trust Ethereum again, because there will be more forks in the future. The precedent is set. They won't all remain "clear cut". So the interesting question is: who's next? It's not ethereum anymore. But it's still an interesting problem space. And maybe there's a team that is actually interested in it. |
Basically, anyone can introduce the fork with any arbitrary changes (including reverting any transactions, or, for that matter, creating more money out of thin air) at any point. But the fork is only viable if the majority of the network decides that they want it. So the governance model was always "majority decides"; it was just made explicit here.
Furthermore, it's impossible to address that problem by any kind of governance, because - this not being a government - submitting to the authority of the governing body is voluntary, and the way you avoid doing so is... by forking. So a fork is always an option, simply by virtue of decentralized implementation.