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Comment by JoachimSchipper | Hacker News Reader

Note that this says more about the defaults in software than about any Ethereum user's opinion.

(The miners may or may not be more informed, but note that Ethereum is only valuable if users are willing to exchange things of value for Ethereum, i.e. a hard fork requires changes in wallet software.)

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There's no default for or against the fork. You have to explicitly choose.

Which are the users you are referring to? Because all kinds of _actual_ users have shown that a clear majority is in favor of the hard fork:

- ETH holders voted on http://carbonvote.com/ with 87% pro-fork. 5.5% of the total ETH supply participated in the vote.

- ETH miners clearly voted pro-fork on the major pools, e.g. https://dwarfpool.com/eth/voting. In nearly all cases > 80% of the hash power was pro-fork.

- ETH markets reacted positively when there were good pro-fork news, and negatively when there were bad news (such as the DDoS vulnerability in the proposed soft fork). Therefore the market sees more value in the post-HF Ethereum.

Yes, there is a vocal group opposing the fork, but it mostly consists of persons wishing to see Ethereum fail.

you consider 5.5% of the money supply a good participation rate?

In the voting on the pools, 80% of people didn't even vote.

Therefore it is simply the fact that the fork was the default choice (and is the default in all the wallets), that is the deciding factor of this 'vote'

By the way, "> 80% of the hash power was pro-fork." is demonstrably false. only 15% of the hashing power was pro fork, 85% of miners didnt vote at all.

Yes, I consider it an _excellent_ participation rate. A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%).

Passive users by definition agree to follow the active users' decision.

> A 5.5% sample size is orders of magnitude larger than that of nearly any sociological study (usually below 0.01%).

Sociological studies tend to actively seek limited size representative samples for cost reasons, and because the mathematics demonstrating the power of a limited size representative sample for making generalization about the universe from which the sample is drawn is well-known.

Comparing the size (relative to the represented universe) of a study sample actively selected to be representative with the relative size of a participant group for which there is little reason to expect it to be representative is not particularly meaningful.

I feel like "passive users" would agree with the status quo? They don't care enough to vote for the fork, so they should have counted as voting against the forks.

No vote means they don't care enough to say either way. Why would anyone who feels strongly against the fork say "I will now let everyone know how much I'm against the fork by not voting"? That's not how it works.

Furthermore, it's been well known for the past 2 weeks that the fork was likely to happen. That means the fork was the status quo. It's what was going to happen assuming nothing derailed it.

I'm an ETH holder and I didn't vote. I was undecided and was happy enough with the decision to fork.

By that logic there should be no Brexit, as less than 50% of the eligible voters voted for it.

Exactly right. But the same logic would apply to the Bentrance in the first place, etc.

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