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Comment by make3 | Hacker News Reader

the idea that forks are easy enough for the power to be distributed seems ludacris. you need to fork a large ratio of the users in order for a fork to do anything at all, otherwise the new coin has no value. This a gives massive inertia advantage to the original project

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Thanks, I feel like I’m the crazy one when people talk about “just fork it” in response to the fact that developers of any specific coin could crash it at any point. That’s not how it works in reality.

Bitcoin could be entirely ruined by a couple dozen people around the world in different ways at any time. Eth and other coins even more so.

The idea of who “gets trusted” in these coins is just nuts. I’m not anti-coin... but man, I’m feel like I’m far enough from it to see a reality that many want to ignore.

I think your misunderstanding is believing users are locked into a crypto system if its implementation is controlled by a small group. They are not - if the developers abuse their power, users are free to migrate elsewhere and take their funds with them (in fiat value or as a different coin).

That's different to e.g. PayPal where your funds can be locked and there's nothing you can do.

Decentralized control over name, logo, features or code of a crypto coin is extremely hard to impossible, if only because there aren't too many people alive that can discuss core crypto features with any meaningful knowledge (I know I can't). Some coins do have governance features, but none of those have profited very much from that.

I believe the point being made is that the _value_ of the crypto system is largely controlled by small groups. Forks rarely achieve the value and status of the prior coin (considering ETC the "fork" here as it was the chain that didn't have the core dev approval).

Furthermore, crypto value is beholden on whales not to just dumping their vast hoards of coins into marketplaces all at once. That is to say, the largest stakeholders in a chain have the opportunity to crush the value of that chain, which means that they have power over other users' choice of chain .

That’s exactly right. And as to whales and who controls the largest amounts of coin. I think people are absolutely crazy if they think and coin since bitcoin doesn’t have the largest share holders as the devs themselves. It’s obvious why there are a million coins right now.

Itslired by the great mystery of bitcoin, it’s like an appealing urban legend to say “we don’t know who owns all our coin by design! wink”. So this doubly makes the coin devs more powerful than “but it’s decentralized” people want to admit.

That's generally a good complaint about "just fork it", but there are some additional factors here.

One - every Ethereum update is a soft fork of the protocol

Two - they are required to be soft forks by the very existence of the difficulty bomb.

Three - running a blockchain is already a social activity that requires everyone participating to opt in to the same protocol.

I don't think it would be easy, by any means, to convince the community to move a different direction than that desired by the core devs. But my main point is that the difficulty bomb is a mechanism to force soft forks frequently. It is not a mechanism to force any particular long term path.

That's a problem for the original developers as well, and is precisely why the difficulty bomb exists. It causes the original project to gradually stop working, forcing the users to migrate to newer code.

Yes because humans are still the end users here and humans congregate into groups. Network effect is a human trait. In order for any network to be useful it needs a majority of people agreeing to use it, and to that end it ends up with inertia. There is no utopia, there's just "more decentralized" or "less decentralized"

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