Such a fork would be more difficult in Bitcoin due to their political/financial (not necessarily technical) decentralization. This fork, if it happens, will be proof that Ethereum is far behind bitcoin in terms of decentralization.
Wouldn't a fork imply more decentralization? Multiple active forks would imply multiple actors working to their own agendas towards different objectives/goals and no central fiat to realign their interests. That would certainly sound more decentralized to me. (The block size tangle and the inability for Bitcoin to fork recently to deal with that almost certainly sounded like a power/political centralization problem to this lay observer from what I was reading, but I've managed to stay somewhat unfamiliar with much of the technical nuance.)
It seems to me like a truly decentralized system would likely be prone to forking. The issue should likely not be whether the system can fork (and how difficult it might be), but how the system handles forks when it does fork.
(This is the "DVCS criteria": a DVCS must realize that merges must be common and handle sometimes heavily divergent forks well and with grace, otherwise it is a bad DVCS that users will hate.)
I think that until Vitalik pulls a Satoshi, Etheruem will never be as decentralized. This has pros and cons, especially with sharding/PoS around the corner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4rohdy/vlad_zamfi...
As a self-described fairly intelligent tech person, the blockchain and its working is still fairly magical to me, so answer me this:
Would it be theoretically possible for big players on the market (read EvilCorp) to push the market over to a fork by convincing enough of its cronies to make the switch?
I'm assuming what you mean is that market consensus is (at least) 51% of the market accepting the fork as "the truth" in terms of value by making further business there instead. Or would it not even require 51% but merely (for example) 20% of the capital that covers 80% of the transactions?
I also assume anyone that wanted could still stick to the former blockchain as long as it has other participants to deal with?
Am I wrong in expecting a synecdoche to the current "real world economy" within cryptocurrency that it loses its democratization when the top X% can force for example a fork?
If the protocol developers and exchanges switch to a fork, there's very little the community can do.
Sticking with the former chain is difficult because 1) everyone else is calling a different chain "Ethereum" therefore you probably need to change your name to something else, 2) You need to be concerned with mining attacks
In this case the sentiment among actual ETH holders is ~ 85% in favor of the hard fork. Check http://carbonvote.com/ (it's not a binding vote, just an indication showing which way the wind blows).
Did you mean to say that it _would_ be more difficult?
If by centralization you mean control of the mining power by a small group of people, then Bitcoin is a lot more centralized than Ethereum.
It's just that the response to the DAO problem was one of consensus, instead of the response to the block size issue in Bitcoin, where they behave like playing a zero sum game and every proposed fork is rejected by someone.