There was no "giant act of fiat". The merge only happened because the overwhelming majority of participants were in full support of such a change. At no single point of time, the ETH developers had any way to decree that the beacon chain was the only one that had any value.
> That's simply the truth.
Thank you though for finally showing that you are just full of dishonest rhetoric.
Again, you're just saying that you thought this fork was a good fork. And for the record: I agree, it was a good fork. But it was still a fork, and thus still a successful attack on the network. Someday, one of those attacks might be on your interests.
And your answer will be that you TRUST that it won't. But that is still an act of TRUST and not "sovereignty". If they want to steal your coins, they can. They've proved it multiple times.
So, getting back to the point this topic is about: does it really seem so odd that people trust Gmail? You have to trust people in this world to not mess up your stuff.
> What about their "self-sovereignty"?
Self-sovereignty is not about "always getting things my way". Is about being able to participate in a system without having some higher authority controlling access.
> successful attack on the network.
A "successful" attack is when someone manages to subvert the system to do something for their personal favor. The system was not subverted. for the merge to happen, the rules had to be defined and followed by everyone. Fuck, the reason that the merge was postponed so many times is because they wanted to have SIX different clients that could reliably participate in the beacon chain.
> If they want to steal your coins, they can.
No one stole anything. The old ETH PoW chain is still there. No one's balances got altered. The fact that most people started seeing that as worthless was not "by fiat".
Wait, really? On September 15th, someone attacked the Ethereum blockchain and stole all the value, handing it off to this other coin. Our coins are still there, but per current markets they're only worth 0.47% of the value they should have. I can't believe you missed that.
Now, obviously you think that's different. And that this giant act of fiat by a centralized operating body was a GOOD act of fiat by a centralized operating body. But it was still a giant act of fiat by a centralized operating body, which points out that the kind of "self-sovereignty" you believe in doesn't exist. You are and will always remain solvent at the whim of the people running the economy you're part of. That's simply the truth.
The difference is that you trust the ETH cabal where you don't trust email providers. And I think that's misplaced.