[once_inc]

If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".

[whimsicalism]

If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.

[ineedasername]

"Majority" doesn't mean anything better than traditional finance when the majority is increasingly a small handful of massive players using their control to avoid the consequences of massive screwups. Instead they make a hard turn towards the same exact "too big to fail" dynamics in traditional finance.

With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum.

Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets.

So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders?

True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going.

[1] https://etherscan.io/accounts/

[whimsicalism]

Ethereum, like any financial instrument, has always been valued by willingness to pay. It is unavoidable that willingness to pay is impacted more by those with more wealth. You cannot sell an asset if nobody wants to buy it and people with money can buy things.

If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.

[ineedasername]

My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto.

All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems.

And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them.

It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.

[whimsicalism]

> My ability to address screwups or fraud on an individual level with banks is significantly higher than anything I'd have with crypto.

Yes, nobody ever suggested that irreversible transactions would make it easier to address fraud. You don't have a central entity to appeal to.

> All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field.

No, it does not agree with that. But the value of ethereum is determined by willingness to pay. There are not a "very small number" of actors with willingness to pay for ethereum.

Crypto is explicitly anti-democratic in that you cannot democratically (ie. by vote) decide to take away someone's asset.

[once_inc]

Agreed, but the big mining pools and stakeholders went with ETH, and with its minority hash rate, ETC died a slow death.

[whimsicalism]

It is about what people were willing to spend money to buy. Not the miners

[lmm]

Nah, it was about what the big name exchanges annointed, and that was decided by a cabal in which the big miners were significant players.