[arcticbull]

Anyone can fork any chain, nothing more than a single miner is required on the new chain. In fact the pre-rollback chain lives on as ETC. A parallel universe where code actually was law.

One entity decided they were sad about code being law and decided to roll back the outcome of a faithfully executed smart contract using their influence. When one person can influence enough miners to make it the principle chain simply to undo what is in their opinion an outcome they disliked, that's centralization. Or at least a plutocracy.

Today that power rests principally with Jeremy Allaire since of course only one chain can represent the real world dollars in his bank account (USDC).

[zeroclip]

What are you even trying to say?

The rules of a blockchain protocol are not immutable, they can and often do change. Users decide to follow the new rules, or they decide not to. The 2016 fork showed that the majority of users and the market chose to follow ETH instead of ETC. In a few days we will probably see another fork, and most likely the majority of users will follow the PoS chain instead of the PoW chain.

[imtringued]

If you want to rollback things build that into your smart contract and stop pretending. If you think your code is mature enough to survive attacks then disable the rollback feature forever.

[zeroclip]

Smart contracts can add rollback and revert functions but it won't save them from an exploited code path. At that point the only way to 'revert' exploited funds is rolling back the entire blockchain by creating a new fork. The market will decide whether to follow the fork. It has happened once, and might happen again one day, but only at the will of the majority of users.

[arcticbull]

Not the majority of the users, the majority of the miners, influenced by leadership/the wealthy. This is plutocracy. And very much not an improvement over the status quo.

[zeroclip]

In Ethereum's proof of stake model, validators do not control the rules and cannot force a change in the protocol. People choose to run nodes, these nodes may or may not be validator nodes, and this software is what enforces the protocol rules across the network. A majority of nodes would have to come to consensus on a change for it to be successful - this happened with DAO, EIP-1559, and probably soon the PoS merge.

It is free to run a node, and the market can freely decide to not support a chain. This is how you end up with ETC being relatively worthless even though there was a group of "rich plutocratic elites" that tried to make it succeed.

There are "influencers" like Vitalik, EF, several client teams, and thousands of hobbyists who work on research and development for the protocol, and these people do lead the direction of the technology moreso than the average user. But this is how all open source works: a small number of people make decisions, and a much larger group of people opt-in to those choices, becoming users. This is also how you end up with multiple blockchains: not everybody was happy using Bitcoin, so some people started to develop Ethereum instead.

[miracle2k]

There is no rollback feature. There is social consensus, which is sort of the whole point. No one can tell you and your friends which fork of the chain to use. Good luck to you. We might call this freedom.