[doctor_eval]

But that government is not legitimate, in the political sense. There is no mechanism for the population of users, as a whole, to vote.

In a sense, it sounds like a political party that splits in two. It’s not democratic; maybe it’s technocratic.

[pfraze]

I think that’s the right follow up question to explore - what establishes political legitimacy. Or perhaps more accurately, what best establishes political legitimacy. There’s arguably a vote in the sense that users of the network choose which fork to adhere to. This isn’t a perfectly distributed vote; you depend on the miners, the validators, the client developers, and the exchanges to establish a concept of the “current fork.” (God help us if all the exchanges ever decided differently than Vitalik what “ethereum” is.) Regular users have a minimal voice in that decision, but it’s theoretically possible for anyone to start a new fork and campaign for its adoption.

Personally I think the question of political legitimacy doesn’t make the notion of blockchain governance wrong; it just highlights that the system as constructed may have problems.