This is why ETH is a centralized coin too.
Because ETH is implicitly "honest" about the BDFL being Vitalik and that its raison d'être (at least for the current juncture) is ongoing R&D experimentation (or at least that is the geekcool idealism marketing to drag in the greater fools to part them from their money), so it is clear that it is not intended to be immutable at this time. My mistake when I originally sided with ETC was I was projecting my idealism (protocol immutability) on the project, but the project's community has a different priority (also a form of idealism) which is about decentralizing experimentation in blockchain apps.
I am on exactly the same line as you here. I was also seriously shocked by the ETH decision, and I sided with ETC, the "truly immutable system". I still think it is the "right" ethereum ; but, as I said, I realise that the market didn't want that strictness.
Thus ETH's overriding mandate isn't "code is the law" and instead is "decentralized community governance" is the law.
My idea is that that is an impossible notion. Decentralized and governance don't go together. I take as a definition of decentralized, that there is no governance, and that everything that happens in the system must be emergent phenomena, and not a rational plan. For me, decentralisation is the absence of rationality, because when you say, rationality, you say, a plan with an objective, and when you say, a plan with an objective, you say "planned beneficiaries and losers".
I think that the only notion of "the common good" is emergent, and never a plan, because if it is a plan, it is the good of the plan maker at the cost of the non-plan maker.
But there are people who take "decentralized" as something like "democratic". If you start even the remotest form of democratic leadership, you end up in systems like the ones we live in. You can think that is fine, or you can hate it. But fact is, if you allow for "governance" (even with democratic rules), you end up with a hierarchic system, and if that is what you like, then there's no reason to do something else than use the systems that are in place. There is no complicated consensus mechanism to be had. You vote for a trusted central authority, that authority defines the consensus in a transparent way, and is regularly exposed to the renewal, or not, of the trust by the majority. No hassle, no block chain. Banks. Our real world system as of today.
Afair, that phrase appeared verbatim on the DAO website, so the marketing of blockchains has always been about the delusion of idealism obscuring the reality of what we are really achieving and doing.
Right. The only question is how far one should go in this delusion, before it becomes an outright scam.
The more I understand crypto systems, the more I understand that my idea of decentralisation is technically difficult (but not impossible) but is interesting nobody and his cat. People need illusionary principles, but don't like to adhere to them.
They want to be leaderless, but want governance. They want to have permissionlessness, but want to be able to exclude the bad guys. They want trustlessness, on the condition that people are honest.
This is why I think there's no point in trying to develop truly decentralized systems even though they are technically not impossible: nobody wants them really.
Yeah the key is "until not". Centralization bites back. Citizens who believed in the Socialist Utopia are finding out the totalitarianism hard way that centralization is a boot on your throat eventually. But let's not get too melodramatic. Why not let Bitcoin be what it can be? It certainly can't have decentralized mining. Core needs to stop fooling us.
I think bitcoin is fine, but clunky and oldfashioned. As long as the centralized powers continue to make block chains in which transactions are taken, people will live in the illusion that they are putting their money in the "safest cryptographic system ever, secured by hundreds of millions of dollars worth of computing that no government can take them away", and buy a pair of shoes with bitcoin for fun, twice in their life, and whine about how the children don't use bitcoin.
After writing the following (the quoted part), I think I may have realized why everyone is so focused on maintaining the illusion of decentralization. Maybe it is because they/we fear governments? Decentralization is what keeps the governments from trying to step in and take national sovereignty over a blockchain.
Yes, we fear them and "we" want them. We hate them, and they have to solve all our problems. We vote for them and we find that they are idiots.
Like with the unstoppable ethereum, until you REALLY learn what it means, you go and whine for the leader to take action and stop the unstoppable, and mute the immutable.
We are like 16-year olds, wanting to be independent and hating our parents, until we have a problem and call for mom and dad.
The only difference is that in many cases, mom and dad really love you, and "leadership" only likes to make you think so.