I am a fan of Ethereum but I wish they (and other alt-coins) would be honest about the fact that there is very much a central authority at work; in Ethereum's case, it's a small network of developers and mining pools. That's not necessarily bad, but let's at least be honest about it.
Admit that central authorities have a role to play (and may take many different forms). Recent events clearly reflect, to me at least, that the value of a blockchain doesn't depend upon the lack of a central authority (indeed, investors may feel safer with a steady hand on the wheel) or immutability (Ethereum violated supposed rule #1 and look at how the market has voted, i.e. ETH/ETC price variance).
The top 5 ETH pools control about 75% of the hash rate. Buterin (for whom I have lots of respect) and others have routinely commented that centralization is a problem in both PoW and PoS systems. In both systems, the problem is "the rich get richer" (as PoW is essentially "proof of stake" in the form of expensive hardware and electricity).
But more to the point, look at what happened with ETH and ETC. The Ethereum Foundation could have decided to hard fork without any particular % of support. Consensus was needed for price support, not to complete the fork. Let's say they forked with only 25% support. The new fork retains the ETH brand. The old chain rebrands (i.e. ETC). The market then votes on how much they value the old versus the new. Now look at ETH/ETC since the fork: the market is saying that they feel more comfortable with a known, trusted authority (i.e. small group of developers with trademarks and a conference schedule) than they do with true democratized first principles of immutable code. I'm not a righteous zealot, I agree with what ETH did and would have done the same thing; I am just calling it out for what it is.
Humans love to collect, horde, and trade items: puka shells, tulips, dot com stocks. Speculation is hard-wired into the human DNA. At some points, asset prices become hopelessly disconnected from the value and utility of the underlying asset. I think the initial rush into crypto was healthy because it funded (and continues to fund) hundreds of full-time researchers who can push the field forward. But at some point the speculative fever becomes a disease that can hurt more than it helps. The sooner we develop real-world applications based on public blockchains as an anchor-point to reality, the better.
> And my point was that if you look at ETH/ETC, the market is saying that they feel more comfortable with a known, trusted authority (i.e. small group of developers with trademarks and a conference schedule) than they do with true democratized first principles of immutable code.
But the fork wasn't a referendum on the governance model of Ethereum. If you picked ETC, you get your liberterian utopia - but you also get a chain where someone made off with 10% of the Ether supply.
Pre-fork ETH owners didn't necessarily have to pick one over the other. Miners had to allocate their resources between the two chains (but could split their bets, and some did so). Pre-fork ETH owners ended up with both chains in a kind of 2-for-1 special.
Every market transaction since then has been a referendum on which model the market prefers. Ultimately, the market price dictates a LOT of down-stream behaviors, e.g. some miners will switch back and forth between ETH and ETC (and other alt-coins) based on hourly yield.
But that's completely beside the point: the point is that you can't have the libertarian-utopia-chain without also getting the hacker-got-away-with-his-loot chain.