Ethereum's Consensus-Through-Split event - ETC vs. ETF and possible naivity about the costs of centralization

Ethereum (ETH) recently gave birth to a forked version of itself, ETF, that boasts a type of "mutability through community-consensus". ETF has moved away from the deterministic protocol of ETH, and introduced a form of court-system, where a court has the power to manually edit the ledger and to enforce changes in the transaction history.

The ETF court ruled that a contract known as "The DAO" had executed in ways that were against the legal-moral code of the ETF democracy, and their verdict was enforced by a hard-fork that "hacked" the state-transition history, creating the spin-off chain ETF. Spin-off chains have been theorised in the past, but ETF is the first real-world experiment.

The ETF fork has gained a wide-support, and that it has distanced itself from the deterministic state-transition system described in the Ethereum whitepaper and yellowpaper seems to have value to the supporters, who often refer to the fork as "the civilized alternative".

The creation of the ETF spin-off has led to a rapid re-organization of the markets. During the split, the original chain is often referred to as Ethereum Classic (ETC) to differentiate the two competing networks. Since everyone who held ETH got a duplicate of their holdings on ETF, and also had their initial holdings on the ETC chain, these duplicate copies of ETF and ETC will be used to vote over what chain the users trust.

This gives rise to the first real-world test of Consensus-Through-Split.

Many argue that subordinating the Ethereum machine under a court-system destroyed the entire value proposition of Ethereum, which has been touted as an "allegal" environment for self-enforcing contracts that cannot be controlled or sub-ordinated a third party, and that ETF has shot itself in the foot by introducing centralised control into a system that is rooted in crypto-law philosophy.

Satoshi Nakamoto took the name Satoshi from the Japanese word for "ash" (1), an ode to the vision of the blockchain as something that would "burn the current system to the ground, so that something new can arise from the ashes". Can ETF compete against Satoshi's legacy, or will they ostrasize the very community that has nourished it ?

Follow the ETC vs ETF Consensus-Through-Split event on slacknation.github.io/medium/13/13.html

References:

1. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair