The SEC disagrees re: Ether
https://www.axios.com/sec-official-ether-is-not-a-security-9...
https://www.axios.com/sec-official-ether-is-not-a-security-9...
If the network on which the token or coin is to function is sufficiently decentralized – where purchasers would no longer reasonably expect a person or group to carry out essential managerial or entrepreneurial efforts – the assets may not represent an investment contract.However, in Ethereum's case, it is designed to literally implode due to ice age if Vitalik doesn't intervene. The SEC was probably not cognizant of this fact when they made their statement.
But Ethereum Classic and Ethereum share a common blockchain history and it proves that the community doesn't always follow blindly the proposals of the Ethereum devs.
That event (a part of the community splitting of on a hardfork and forming Ethereum Classic) has affected the governance of Ethereum ever since. Not directly, but indirectly.
Every hardfork is now checked for contentious changes very thoroughly. The last major change that didn't make it because of that was the proposed change to the mining algorithm (granted, ProgPOW had other problems as well).
There is no real world use. It probably wouldn't even exist without Grayscale.
It so happens that the consensus of the majority decided to stick with Ethereum rather than classic. But still no single person or entity gets to decide.
The Ethereum foundation kept a huge stash from the pre-mine, so you'd have a hostile actor with a large position on your forked chain, enough to crash the price of any nascent chain. This combination is a governance model rooted in game theory.
Ethereum Classic shows pretty well how this works in practice. There was controversy around the DAO, yet no fork could be kept functional. It is a Grayscale project which they will keep around as long as people are willing to speculate on it. Nobody pretends it has any real use.
This is completely false. The Ethereum Foundation has less than 0.5M ETH, or less than 1% of the total supply.
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The "Ice Age" is a builtin feature of the Ethereum chain, where the mining difficulty deliberately ramps up to an unreasonably level past a certain number of blocks. The only thing which can reset this is for nodes to update to a revised consensus algorithm.
The point of this is to essentially force a periodic "vote of confidence" -- instead of nodes passively not updating their software, every few years they HAVE to, or the difficulty bomb comes into play. Which means when a major hard fork update is proposed, no one can sit on the sidelines, they have to either choose the proposed fork, or propose an alternative for consensus to rally around. This cycle repeated every year or so, and has gone pretty smoothly so far.
The point of this is to encourage active participation, so nodes can't sit there and cast "passive no" votes to everything, they're incentivized to actively participate in the network's evolution.
Even if a node doesn't update, mining just slows down. Nothing anywhere in that process will cause the Ethereum network to "implode", that's IMO a rather emotionally charged way of describing things.
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As to "requiring Vitalik's intervention" -- that's just an outright falsehood.
Not only is Vitalik not directly involved in the coding of any of the multiple independent Ethereum clients anymore, but there is a very large group of developers (of which the "founders" are a very small %) which work out the proposals for updates. And anyone can propose an update -- the software and the high level specs are all open source (and most are on github).
Proposing a full milestone update of the Ethereum network is complex, and probably more work than a single individual could pull off reliably -- but that's the whole point. There is no gatekeeper (and definitely not Vitalik), and the only way these things are accepted is because the larger community (validators/miners, folks running nodes, user community) all feel involved enough to accept or reject proposals.
You could remove every single founding developer, every incorporated organization, and the Ethereum network and it's developers would keep going. And the value of the token derives from it's use on the network, not on those companies turning a profit (and most of them are non-profits).
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All of the above, along with numerous other aspects of the new beacon chain, are designed to incentivize decentralization of assets and control, as well as active over passive participation.
I think the SEC was quite well aware of the situation, and made the right call about Ethereum.