Bitcoin struggled for years to get a change adopted that most of the community thought was a good one, because nobody, not even Satoshi if they are still around, could change it.
On what legal basis do you insist that the differentiation must be by inclusion of a “mechanism”?
The way we tend to judge whether things fit into legal categories is by the criteria specified in the controlling law (including relevant statutes, administrative regulations, and case law.)
While cryptocurrency enthusiasts are fond of an approach where the mechanism is all that is relevant, mechanisms may be all, part, or none of what is relevant in law. While only tangentially relevant here, an amusing example in securities law is what something is commonly called can be relevant, even decisive, because the definition of a ‘security’ in statute includes (but is not limited to) ‘any interest or instrument commonly known as a “security”’. 15 U.S. Code § 77b(a)(1)
The presale.
Edit: the context of this is the question of whether Ethereum is a security. The SEC has already ruled that it is, and the ruling came down to the fact that it had a presale (via the Howey test).
Some argue otherwise. That will need to be determined in the courts or congress, not by a regulatory bully.
The SEC was set up by congress, the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and several others [1]. The Howey test was made by the courts and at least finalized by the supreme court [2].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/about/about-securities-laws
[2] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/328/293.html
You argued that "courts or congress" should determine whether Ethereum meets the bar for being a security. My links point out that the the courts and congress has already put a process in place, as you seem to be requesting in your your comment:
> That will need to be determined in the courts or congress...
It sounds like you have additional complaints/issues about the SEC outside of those you put in your comment. My reply was not to address SEC as a whole, only that the "courts or congress" are the wellspring for the procedures and processes currently in place like you seemed to request.
Difficulty bombs. https://twitter.com/level39/status/1554174864600227843
The point is that the community/network/whatever that formed around bitcoin isn't centralized, so even for relatively "tame" changes like taproot, nobody could agree and it took years to merge regardless of technical merit. For better or worse and for a wide number of reasons I can speculate about, the equivalent social structure around Ethereum is far more centralized around the will of Vitalik and a handful of others, and they've demonstrated repeatedly (except around the ETC debacle which has mostly fizzled) that they can get the whole network to adopt even fairly complex and risky changes. Monero regularly forks, and even though it doesn't have a formalized leadership structure, is able to get changes rolled out. Same with ZEC and the electric coin company. Be it a single person, a pseudonym, an organization, or whatever, everything but bitcoin has forked repeatedly, which indicates a degree of central control (and thus central benefit, from the POV of regulators). In most cases outside of bitcoin, the founders have also enriched themselves enormously by remaining in control.
Contrast with the attempted forks of bitcoin: BCH was a huge mess and has been slowly fizzling out for years. BSV is a joke. Yes you could create a new fork today, but the whole point is that the difference isn't technical, it's a network. The network is partially technical (there are still lots of miners that won't mine your new fork) but is also cultural, and bitcoin users/miners/exchanges don't look up to the "dev team" as an authority. That's the key difference IMO. If you just focused on the technical you'd still be arguing that betamax was a better format.