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Comment by RexetBlell | Hacker News Reader

The fact that Ethereum Classic exists proves that Buterin has no control.

No it doesn't. ETC is worth something like 2% of the value of ETH, it's a joke in comparison. Besides, the existence of "Ethereum Classic" is not something special, it's the inevitable side effect of suddenly having the balance of your ETH wallet "cloned" in a fork, you only have to lose if you don't treat both wallets like they're real.

But if the market did not like the new direction, it was super easy to move to ETC.

Just like with the OpenOffice, LibreOffice fork. Everyone was free to use one or the other. The community chose.

> The community chose

The "community" chose to roll back a $40 million transaction that was very inconvenient for Vitalik. If he had instead said "code is law, and we stand by it" then ETC would never have existed in the first place. My point is, it was Vitalik's prerogative to reverse a million dollar transaction that he didn't like, a privilege reserved for the elite.

Beyond that, the community didn't really have a choice either way. By definition of owning ETH you are incentivized to (primarily) support whichever chain the creator says he will continue to support. What kind of choice is that? There is no "market" in the sense you speak of, ETH users are a captive audience.

It's important to keep in mind that the creators of ETH gave themselves an order of magnitude more coins to start with than will ever be mined. While it is true that some of it has been sold many times over by now, it still creates a power dynamic within the community which can hardly be ignored.

It's especially problematic for a project that was supposed to be PoS, where the coin holders are also the miners, with the privileges that brings.

The existence of ETC says to me that ETH has the same problem, that is a bunch of power users can change the rules if they want to (if it is financially beneficial for them to do so). No different to a fiat currency controlled by the government.

Yeah that's just wrong. If you want to change the rules, you need to update the client software which means forking. Are you saying that a group of core devs can fork the chain and not have it be contentious?

That's what happened with Ethereum.

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