That's because the $50M were owned by a large percentage of the users of Ethereum, not a single person. It represented 15% of the total ETH in circulation, back when the currency was in a very nascent state and the flagship product that ETH provided that BTC didn't, was the DAO. When the DAO break happened ETH lost 60% of its value, so not only did 15% of people have their money stolen, but everyone across the board lost 60% of their ETH value. There was simply immense demand for people to get their money back, so people much preferred the fork that kept their money than the fork where the robber stole their money.Simple as that, it's decentralized, that's the whole point, you fundamentally can't tell people which fork to believe, people use whatever fork they want. And the people mostly wanted the fork with their money in the DAO preserved. People who wanted the unaltered chain stayed there, no big deal.
tornato7|4 years ago
A hacker minted free Bitcoin in 2010 and the chain forked to remove that transaction. But nobody's talking about that being a scam. How is the Dao hack any different?