It is very refreshing to see people stand up for principles against narrow self-interest of a political group or authority.
I bet you non-ironically have uttered "just this once" too
I don't even know who VB is. I only care about this from a technological perspective. But presumably such a drastic action would not be happening often, if you have to get most of the network to vote.
Was there something that gives a ruling council the ability to override miners? If not I think you're being unreasonable in the way you're criticizing.
Miners work in pools, and it's up to the pool operators to make decisions for a hard fork. In the case of Ethereum it took about 4 or 5 mining pools to reach majority (over 51% of network hashing power).
A great deal of miners simply leave their mining rigs running and didn't make a decision either way. Miners largely do not care about any cryptocurrency. They will, understandably, mine whatever is most profitable.
Miners also depend heavily on ping times and the total mining power of their pools. With 15 second block times every millisecond counts to make sure you're the first with the right block and get your reward. There was really no time for anti-fork mining pools to get setup well and it takes months for a pool to amass an attractive amount of miner hashing power.
Overall the vote was about 5% for the fork, 1% against, and 94% abstaining. Ideally it would take a true 51% to change the network.
However one feels about the principal of the decision to fork and the decision of the market to follow the Ethereum Foundation, downvoting factual descriptions of recent price movement on the ETC chain constitutes inherently scammy behavior.
I don't think it's correct that the only relevant component of people using it is people speculating/pumping -and-dumping .
So, I would think that saying that it is a scam, is not true.
Note: I do not own any of it. Nor have I owned any cryptocurrency that was available on any exchange. (I've owned testnet ether, both pre release, and recently, but that's it)
It's worth noting that before the fork there was no ETC "movement", there was just people who were unhappy with the fork. Everyone expected the fork to go to ETH.
However, when sufficient mining power refused to fork, a movement coalesced from the people who opposed the fork.
ETC is still up %300 from its stable post-fork price. The current mining power is up 2x-4x what it was post fork as well. Most of the rise of its price was preceded by increases in its mining power.
This implies that people are putting money into mining it.
When a fork happens you end up with a lot of people who have duplicated coins, so you would expect the "losing" fork to have some significant price dynamics.
But the growth in hash rate and the sustained price implies this is not a "scam".
That said I don't know what its future is- it needs a roadmap and a reason to exist to become viable long term. But at this point you can't say that won't happen.
I hold neither ETC nor ETH.