[Klinky]

It was pandering to big stakeholders. That's the problem with all cryptocurrencies, they don't solve big players having huge influence over the underlying currency. It is still very much a "who you know" and "how much profit is at stake" kind of game, which is one of the main reasons people hate state-run currencies. The little guys lose thier shirt and get a "too bad,so sad" response. A big player losses thier shirt and they go cry to thier dev friends who fix the boo boo with a fork. How about we fork on every compliant of someone making a mistake?

[drcode]

I agree with what you're saying 100%, actually. Egalitarianism in the blockchain world remains an elusive goal, just as it does in other fields.

[Klinky]

You agree with what I stated, but what you wrote that I responded to suggested the community was in agreement on the fork. It was powerful members of the community who stood to lose a lot of money who pushed for the fork, and everyone had to follow unless they also wanted to lose a lot of money. This doesn't look good on Ethereum and saying "the community changed the law" isn't the actual truth, nor really how Ethereum was advertised.

[drcode]

I think any time you get people together to hammer out a plan it's going to be messy and imperfect. However (1) Vitalik didn't have final say on anything (2) Various vote attempts and the message boards seemed to indicate preference for a fork, and this was also the case in my social network. This to me indicates the right decision was made, even if there was probably unfair favoratism on some levels.

> nor really how Ethereum was advertised

This meme is kind of silly to me: Would it be false advertising for BMW to say "Pushing the gas pedal makes the car go forward" after a single BMW had to be taken to the shop because of a broken gas pedal?

(I'm talking about advertising for ethereum in general, not for the DAO itself. I agree the DAO advertising was totally inexcusable for many reasons. I wish I had had the guts to say so more publicly at the time.)

[setr]

It's much more fundamental than that example though. BMW only guarantees that the gas pedal moves the car forwards in normal operation.

Ethereum even now advertises itself on its homepage as

>Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.

But clearly, we had a program that very specifically ran exactly as programmed, and its operation was interfered by a third party (the community hard-fork). Ethereum offers a guarantee that is not held; this is false advertising.

If it is a guarantee that cannot be held, it is still false advertising.

But even more so, Ethereum imagines itself to have no established authority; to be decentralized. But obviously, it is not. The final say clearly remains with the Ethereum developers, even if the community has the option to secede. (You can renounce your citizenship from the US, everyone can wholesale, but this does not mean the US has no centralized authority.) Bitcoin, of course, offers the same situation; the difference being that bitcoin's authorities do not collude, and by community happenstance, it is unlikely that they will. Such a fork is unimaginable in that universe.

Ethereum (and its many users) imagines itself to be of Bitcoin's equivalence, a large enough and stable enough network that offers little ability and incentive for its authorities to collude. But, of course, this is false. It remains small enough that a hard-fork is viable; proven by the act of a hard-fork.

This is false advertising, in the sense that it misrepresents fundamental components of the system. It might support decentralization given a sufficiently large network, but it does not (yet) have sufficiently large network. But either it pretends its network is sufficiently large, or it pretends that requirement does not exist.

[wyager]

This hasn't been a problem with Bitcoin. No transactions have been reversed because a big player got robbed. The only hard forks in Bitcoin have been due to implementation bugs, and it's only happened once or twice.

[Klinky]

You still have most of the power concentrated within the developers, pool owners, and exchanges. This has resulted in major instability due to some of these major players operating effectively scams via either outright stealing or the hiding of major losses.

Most of the issues with currencies(and most everything) is trust and the motivations of other people. Technology might help democratize a world currency, but those who corner the market first will have major influence over it, which in turn will quickly result in the same imbalance in power which was trying to be avoided.