Hey Tobi,
In reality, it’s human organization that hasn’t changed much over the last 10,000 years. People always organize in some shape or form, engage in conflict, and use power—regardless of the actual form of governance (democracy, autocracy, monarchy, etc.). The system always exists; it’s just either transparent or hidden.
Again, the informality is chaotic and sometimes hard to grasp…
I beg to disagree. Ethereum has never been the kind of chaotic anarchy you’re referring to. The current system is actually very organized, structured, and controlled by hidden balances of money and power. Pretending to be anarchic and random is entirely different from actually being anarchic. Burning Man is anarchy—you can do whatever you want. Linux is, to a significant degree, anarchy, shaped by the way Linus Torvalds thinks. If Ethereum were truly an anarchy, Devcon would accept any submission, and people would randomly discuss things with conflicting opinions.
All possible directions can be explored at the same time by different projects/chains - that doen’t mean one particular chain must try all directions simultaneusly and cannot have a very particular path it tries to explore.
This argument would make sense if Ethereum were still just a research project. But it’s not — it’s the world’s second-largest blockchain by market capitalization. People around the world buy ETH because they see it as a store of value and deflating currency. People at the top of EF constantly appear on podcasts and across Twitter, promoting Ethereum as both a store of value and “ultrasound money.” Given this messaging, there is a moral responsibility to small ETH holders. Denying token holders voting rights is fundamentally immoral because they buy ETH with real money. It is also incredibly ironic because blockchain is supposed to be decentralized.
The Ethereum Foundation could wake up tomorrow and tweet something like this: “Hey everyone, we’re just a research chain. We love computer science. We’re not Bitcoin, we’re not a store of value — we’re just computer scientists having fun. Forget about ultrasound money, forget about transaction fees, forget about governance. And if you don’t like it, go run another chain.”
If that message ever came out, I can assure you the value of ETH would crash immediately, because this is not what people around the world think what ETH is when they buy ETH.
So there is a moral responsibility to deliver to these people what they want which means reasonable governance structures to preserve the store of value.