I think the DAO hack is misrepresented in the crypto community lore. The network simply decided to follow the main developers and those that did not, kept with what is now ETH classic. A hard fork can happen in absolutely _all_ cryptocurrencies, and I see it as a feature rather than a bug.
While I generally agree, I will say that the ability to dictate a Schelling point is a form of power.
Imagine a first past the post election, where there is no official list of candidates (one simply writes in a name), but where a particular person has the position that they are always the first person to publicly recommend any candidate, and all voters hear this recommendation.
This would be a powerful position, even if that person was not eligible as a candidate, and even though everyone can vote for whatever candidate they want.
When in a position of significant power, even if this power is only of the form of one’s reputation and/or one’s influence on Schelling points, one has a responsibility to, when exercising this power, to take into account the effect it will have on others.
I don’t mean that he failed to do so. I imagine it must have been a difficult decision! And I do hold Vitalik in high regard.
But if one presents such a fork as being merely the the result of independent choices of each user, I think one is mistakenly omitting the power used by big names which promote one fork or another.
I don’t mean to say that this power being present is a problem that needs to be solved, making this power not present. I don’t think that is possible.
Like I said, I do largely agree with much of the “people are free to choose what fork they use” framing.
But while I think it is probably basically the best that can be achieved, I do think it is best to acknowledge that even without authority from things other than social influence and such, that there is still power through said social influence + Schelling point influence + etc. , and it is possible for this power to be misused (though I don’t claim that it was misused in this particular case).
In addition, I do think it seems prudent and good to avoid exercising this power unless the reason to use it is especially compelling (e.g. either part of an upgrade which basically the whole community has been expecting for a long time, or which has overwhelming support, or to handle something which , if not handled, could have an existential impact on the chain, or things like this) . (And, while I haven’t kept up with his latest writings and actions, I suspect he kind of agrees?)
I think you are spot on, with the addendum that exercising this power comes with costs - see the very DAO hack we talked about. So while I fully agree this power exists, it is not unlimited and is invested by the users of the network. I also think Vitalik is aware of all these and they are actually using these principles in the ETH governance.
This just means that as far as users are concerned there is no such thing as an immutable blockchain. That's because people don't interact with chains directly, they use "Bitcoin" and "Ethereum", and those names have an inherent mutability in what they refer to.
The Ethereum developers convinced enough players of the crypto ecosystem to change what chain the name "Ethereum" refers to, not unlike a dns change (but to a large extent, done manually; there were humans in the loop to activate the hard fork). So wallets and exchanges changed the chain that the name "Ethereum" pointed to. Nodes migrated, and miners too. And it just happened that this fork was made specifically to revert a certain transaction.
Those that were left on the original chain had to pick another name for it, and build another branding. It was now called ETC instead of ETH, even though it was ETH that changed; ETC points to the old chain that used to be called ETH.
From the perspective of users, the transactions on ETH were truly reversed. Immutability is a mirage. (This is not necessarily a bad thing though.)
