As people have pointed out this means that the US or wherever can print money and controls your monetary policy, but that's actually the least of the problems. Euros and US Dollars in large quantities, and digitally transferrable versions of them, can essentially only exist as numbers in databases controlled by the US and EU government respectively. So by adopting them as your country's currency, you're effectively giving them control over your money. They get to decide whether it continues to exist, whether you get to access it, whether it gets transferred to some well-connected megacorporations in those countries that bribed your former leader into a dodgy deal... In short, it gives a whole bunch of control to powerful entities who have tended to use their powers in ways that have not been good for developing countries at all.
Ethereum is not Bitcoin. Ethereum just showed the world Botcoin's unique value compared to Ethereum and the thousands of crypto projects so often conflated with Bitcoin.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
I just don't see the relevance considering the absolutely insane amount of things that have happened that would cause nobody to act in this fashion again, namely...uh...many public people are using the project publicly.
The fork stuck because it was still an alpha, as far as society was concerned.
It's currently in a grey area between a social movement and a FOSS project, and it simply started as a FOSS project.
I think it's important to characterize what occurred with this context. Devs won't get another chance at that without the project (and movement!) ending — and everyone knows it.
You are always tied to the monetary and fiscal policy of the majority of a currency’s participants.
Can you make your own currency? Of course. How will you back it? Who will trust it? Who governs those policies? These are people problems people want to solve without people (crypto folks), with expected results (speed running financial regulation). They came at the king (reserve currencies) and missed by a mile.
Correct, but historically the price had been stable and predictable.
Imo you're just trading "beholden to the usgovt" with "beholden to miners, whales and wall street" plus wild price swings. Former or latter may be preferable for certain reasons, but for fiscal stability or day-to-day use the choice seems obvious to me.
Sure, but the ECB or Federal Reserve can print money, and you don't control them. If your goal is a mathematically guaranteed money supply (this would not be my goal, fwiw), BTC is superior.