With Bitcoin, no one has control!
Well, until a little over 50% of the miners decide they don't like you.
Ethereum's fork proved "no one has control" is an illusion.
The 2017 Bitcoin scaling wars proved that one can't simply change Bitcoin's consensus rules by majority control of the miners. I think at one point 80% of the miners were in favor of large blocks, yet they didn't have buy-in from the rest of the network participants (developers, regular users, merchants, exchanges).
Bitcoin has really robust decentralization.
The ETH fork happened before the people on HN were even following cryptocurrency happenings.
That's how early in the project a fork was done — the project would never survive another at this stage of maturity.
And everyone knows that.
So stop repeating it?
The fork stuck because it was still an alpha, as far as society was concerned.
It's currently in a grey area between a social movement and a FOSS project, and it simply started as a FOSS project.
I think it's important to characterize what occurred with this context. Devs won't get another chance at that without the project (and movement!) ending — and everyone knows it.
In fact trying to get a neutral or deflationary currency is a no brainer. Especially, if you have a small banking system/network.
Of course there are gotchas.
Can you make your own currency? Of course. How will you back it? Who will trust it? Who governs those policies? These are people problems people want to solve without people (crypto folks), with expected results (speed running financial regulation). They came at the king (reserve currencies) and missed by a mile.
Imo you're just trading "beholden to the usgovt" with "beholden to miners, whales and wall street" plus wild price swings. Former or latter may be preferable for certain reasons, but for fiscal stability or day-to-day use the choice seems obvious to me.
The price of BTC, even today, seems very easy to manipulate.