[CodeShmode]

> Their influence still can override the mining process that’s supposed to be the final word on transactions.

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?

[ineedasername]

I'm not talking about tampering, not in the sense of a 51% double spend or anything. I'm talking about off-chain real world human influence. I'm talking about things like The DAO, an organization that was such a huge player in ethereum at the time that when they suffered an exploit like so many others have over the years ethereum did a hard fork for just them to fix things.

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.

[once_inc]

If all the large entities band together and frame the issue as something negative that needs to be prevented/reverted, then nobody will care enough to attempt punishment. We've seen this when ETH and ETC split after Vitalik used ETH in the premine to vote for a split, then framed it as "the majority wants to split".

[whimsicalism]

If the majority didn't want a split, they were free to keep trading ETC.