Do you know what happened in Ethereum? The block chain split and now both chains are running independently. You can buy New Ether or Ether Classic. If this happens a lot it will be crazy and confusing.

It will be confusing to people thinking in a 20th century way, where everything must have one reality.

The future is all about multiple versions of reality maintained simultaneously. There's no reason there has to be a single monetary system with agreement. Small groups of people with different values can have a totally different view of who has how much money.

You're right it's confusing, that's why this hasn't started happening until the software age. Now that we have software, we don't have to understand the books, we just have to be able to write software that can make sense of them.

There will always be a "main Ethereum" for people who need a single-source-of-truth and don't want to deal with multiple realities. But the point of anarchist software is that everyone doesn't have to agree. Everyone can just do their own thing, and elect to share realities when they want to.

This idea that there is one Bitcoin Network and one Ethereum Network is the biggest misconception people have about federated technologies. People imagine consensus means "one truth". But consensus means many truths, each which only have consensus within themselves. There's always been many Bitcoins. We just ignore most of them, by choice. We're so used to someone forcing us at gunpoint to agree to a single universal legal reality that we have a hard time imagining a world where there are lots of different sets of conflicting rules, and individuals choose which ones to pay attention to.

There really are two issues here:

1) in actual fact, very few votes were cast for ETH. Although many people ran the clients that supported a fork, most of them simply did so because it was the only option for their chosen client - there was no non-fork client option easily available to them. Very few people explicitly chose the clients to support the fork.

2) "Will of the people" defeats the point of ETHs smart contracts. If everyone in the pool decided to buy in on a bet of a digital coin toss, and the bet ends up 51% heads and 49% tails, is it ok for the heads bettors to simply consensus the bet out of the chain and reclaim their money in the event that tails wins?

Blockchains require the will of the people. You can't force people to acknowledge numbers just because they're written down somewhere unless you point a gun at them. If the people you want to interact with start looking at a different source of truth, you can't stop them.

Despite this fundamental truth, blockchains are extremely useful.

I can accept this, but it means that smart contracts can't be trusted. Ethereum can't have it both ways, despite saying they can.

That's reasonable enough. I think when there are contracts people actually want to use, no one will be turned away by the small chance that the entire ecosystem will maliciously alter that contract.

All the major clients included a non-fork option. The decision was ultimately made by the miners, who certainly have the technical competence to set options at the terminal.

Isn't Bitcoin mining quite centralized, with a few chinese operators controlling a large majority?