Yeah, and then nearly half of the miners kept going with the old fork anyway. On Ethereum Classic, the theives who scammed $400 million worth of 2016 ETH from the founders, valued at who knows what now, still have that money, and they have spent it, and it's still considered good on the ETH Classic chain.

ETH Classic's current price is $47 (compared to ETH at about $3000). The DAO hacker got 3.6 million ETH, so its current value on the Classic chain is $169 million.

This is a distorted retelling of history. Mining pools ultimately did settle on voting in favor of the hard fork, but did so through collusion and lack of transparency. Most notably, ethermine miners voted against the hard fork, but the pool operators contributed the entire pools votes in favor of the fork any way. There were similar situations with other mining pools, and in general the actual miners were left in the dark. The Ethereum Foundation was communicating with mining pool operators and exchange operators in private chats the entire time all of this was playing out.

Was the hard fork the right move in a pragmatic sense? Probably. But it was not at all the exemplar of decentralized consensus that people seems to remember these days. It was messy and ugly.

Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a decentralized network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

how does that differ from a centralized network. Let me copy/paste your comment

  Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a decentralized network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

into

  Yeah but collusion and lack of transparency is what you get with a CENTRALIZED network! With no rules to enforce, the powerful can do whatever they want, including acting badly.

I see no difference.

You should see a difference, because a centralized network can be governed (by the central entity!). A decentralized network necessarily cannot, because there is no controlling... centralized... mechanism.

Miners are never in control of the chain. Node operators are.

That's not how "decentralization" should work.

How should it work? No one gets to make a choice which fork they run?

People cast votes (digitally mind you, which is always great and unproblematic and very secure also) and then a very tiny minority executed what is, by every standard imposed by cryptoheads, illegitimate behavior. That's more or less the definition of a referendum, which makes the ETH foundation and a top percentage of miners an executive government.