Any attempted tampering would be highly visible and why would anyone with control of that much ETH risk loss of trust in their valuable asset?
How many smaller players in the crypto scene have received that kind white glove treatment, going against the "code is law" principle, when they've lost huge sums of money? Code was law right up until The DAO massively screwed up and was deemed Too Big to Fail. No different than traditional financial institutions.
As the mining resources of the various trustless Proof of $X models needed to makes crypto work are increasingly centralized into the hands of massive players in the field the principle of crypto democratizing control of money & finance is becoming an Emperor With [increasingly] No Clothes.
With proof of stake there will be no more abstraction layer to hide this fact any more either. Majority will mean the very small number of organizations holding a majority of ethereum, not the majority of __people__ holding ethereum.
Very roughly by eyeballing the numbers here [1] about 450 walled own about 51% of ethereum. Out of about 0.000225% of ethereum wallets in control of 51%, and that's not even taking into account whales that may control multiple of those largest wallets.
So your what's your definition of "majority" here when it comes to future governance issues, the 450 or the 200,000,000 other holders?
True democratization of crypto would have it be the latter, but that's not where I see things going.
If someone told you otherwise, I am sorry that you were misled.
All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field. It is not the democratization of money & finance that proponents & crypto idealists use in their rhetoric to promote a supposed revolution in the field. It's substantially similar to traditional systems with a few minor (relative to the proposed revolution) features that might offer improvements on the traditional systems.
And yes, lots of people have told me otherwise-- that crypto will put the the aggregated power of traditional financial systems into the hands of the people and all sorts of things along those lines. It's not hard to find such crypto evangelicals. But no I have __never__ been misled by them.
It's always been obvious to me that any actual promise that crypto may have in improving financial systems falls massively short of promises made.
Yes, nobody ever suggested that irreversible transactions would make it easier to address fraud. You don't have a central entity to appeal to.
> All your statement does is agree with my sentiment that crypto like ethereum is controlled by a very small number of very large players in the field.
No, it does not agree with that. But the value of ethereum is determined by willingness to pay. There are not a "very small number" of actors with willingness to pay for ethereum.
Crypto is explicitly anti-democratic in that you cannot democratically (ie. by vote) decide to take away someone's asset.