I was wondering how Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is able to walk around without a security detail, going on extensive backpacking trips, what if someone steals his keys?
He’d just fork the entire blockchain.
Normal users don’t have that luxury.
He’d just fork the entire blockchain.
Normal users don’t have that luxury.
> Normal users don’t have that luxury.
Everybody else can fork the entire blockchain, too. The difference is that if a "normal user" does such a fork, hardly anyone does care. The central difference rather is that the trust and authority that Vitalik Buterin holds - if he does a decision, it is accepted by and large.
The question that you should rather ask is: why do so many people involved in Ethereum have so much trust in Vitalik Buterin's authority and decisions?
But no, even Vitalik could not get a split off fork done unless it was something with major security implications for the whole Ethereum ecosystem.
>It was initially unclear as to whether the fork would be executed. Though it was proposed by Ethereum developers, they did not have the unilateral power to implement the change. Miners, exchanges, and node operators also had to agree to update their software. After more heated debate in public forums, on July 20, 2016, at block 192,000, the Ethereum hard fork was implemented.
https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...
There have been many large ETH compromises since then, and the idea of forking for any of them would be considered outrageous.
This is pretty well documented in the Cryptopians book; the DAO hard fork was driven almost exclusively by people outside the EF.