"Deconstructing 'Decentralization': Exploring the Core Claim of Crypto Systems" (2019): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3326244
If you believed that ETC was the correct option in that decision, you were free to mine that chain all you want.
You're right that miners choose profitability, but we also choose technology. I don't mine BTC any more, I mine with GPUs (and thus ETH). There are a dozen chains I could mine with these GPUs, but I'd like to see the success of ETH over others.
I can tell you with certainty, no quorum of powerful individuals influenced that decision.
Many people don't understand that GPUs don't have the same hardware race war as bitcoin ASICs. Older GPUs actually have better ROI because the ethash algo is constrained by memory controller speed, not as much by nm scale or clock rate. The GPUs we use today were new old stock from many years ago. This is why we don't see a large influx of ASICs for ethash... it just isn't profitable.
We can sell (or use) the GPUs at a later date for other purposes than just mining. In fact, as we race towards "the merge" and PoS, it astounds me that someone isn't working on something all these miners can switch their compute resources to mine profitably.
It is crazy to think that ETC could actually become a viable chain again (but they have some plans to switch a more friendly ASIC algo, which I don't think will work out well for them). Note that ETC is a mess right now, exchanges have 6+ day holds on transfers because nobody trusts the chain.
I'll be transparent and admit that there are some other significant non-technical factors as well, but can't discuss them here.
It's about trust because "code is law" is pretty obviously marketing rather than foundational principle.
You're building data centers for decentralized compute?
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2020/03/12/in-defense-of-block...
For every technology we use today, there was a time it was laughably inadequate as a replacement for what came before.
Now CODE can do a lot more. In our applications for instance, you can:
1) Know the average amount spent on food or clothing by a citizen of a city
2) Vote on how much of food, clothing etc to simply subsidize by issuing more currency and airdropping it to the people (universal basic income)
3) Take a dot product between 1 and 2, and issue the universal basic income or stipend etc. and redistribute the wealth in the community according to the
And best of all — it is entirely voluntary, thanks to smart contracts. No one has to accept your currency by fiat. But if they do, they’re helping to end food insecurity in your community. Just like that. No representative democracy and out of touch elites. Just the community taking care of its business and its vulnerable. Via a smart contract and decision making.
And that is just ONE of the many applications that are possible. Intercoin has produced 10-15 applications that can all work together like LEGOs. Now we will be giving them to communities. Here are some more possibilities:
It's not that people are laughing at it now; it's that it's already been proven to be a fraud, where the promise of an immutable blockchain is a grift to part suckers from their money.
People can’t trust the code to do what they want, because when you read it you might mistake a 0 or a O. You trust someone else or machine to audit the code tell you the code will do what you want.
US court systems take into account the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. Its a feature not a bug.
Until gas fees make it accessible only to the "out of touch elites"
Smart contract can be done in completely different ways, with no bottlenecks. If you notice point 2 of https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf .. I can send you the details if you're interested. I spent years speaking with the best teams around the world working on things beyond blockchain.
How is this really different than a 51% attack?