Code seems to be the law, hence why they're resorting to begging and blackmailing

Underrated comment. Very wise.

Not “anyway“ but because of the hack. TheDAO was done for after it was hacked. The code was too bad and trust was gone as well. That was clear pretty soon.

The only thing to decide was if they would let the hacker get away with at the time 15% of the whole supply. If they did that it would have endangered the decentralization of the eventual proof-of-stake switch.

> it would have endangered the decentralization

So the solution to save "decentralization" was for a centralized cabal to literally rewrite history?

Technically, there was no rewriting of history. Just a single (but very large) transaction was added to the consensus rules that (IIRC) replaced the TheDAO smart contract code.

Given that this incident resulted in the Ethereum/Ethereum Classic split, the "centralized cabal" was not very effective. The community voted with their feet and many went to Ethereum Classic.

> it would have endangered the decentralization

So they decided to kill it outright?

You have to specify what kind of decentralization you're getting at.

The distribution of ETH was less decentralized before the hard fork than afterwards. 15% of the whole supply in one hand is quite a concentration in the distribution.

Because 'code is law' is a terrible expression to begin with. Law can be expressed with code, but law is ultimately a construct of human consensus. In the case of the DAO hack, the human consensus forked away from the bugs in the code.

There are many laws that have nothing to do with human consensus. Physical laws, for example.

Physical laws and legal laws don't have anything in common except the name.

They have a lot in common. They are admissibility conditions under a rule system. Same thing with laws encoded in a computer system.

Your argument is circular; “code isn’t law because I’ve redefined the word ‘law’ to explicitly preclude it”.

Ethereum the project never talked about it as “code is law” anyway. It was the company that created The DAO that memed it into existence.