This piece was solid.
This they managed even though there was quite a bit of ambiguity about what the vast majority of ethereum holders and miners actually wanted to do. There was some voting, but because of the short time frame, confusion and complexity, none of the votes had particularly large turnouts.
But this is not. The consensus was pretty clear at the time as no gauge showed an anti-HF majority. Those anti-HFers had it easy to show everyone how wrong it was -- they could have doubled their or tripled it. I alone could have increased the Carbonvote results substantially. It took so little and yet when push came to shove, the anti-HF was the vocal minority.
It's even more clear now when you look at the economic vote we are seeing between ETH and ETC. One is worth 25x more than the other. One has 25x more hashing power. So to see that as a battle that ETC can win, you have to think that not only is the crazy project that was/is Ethereum viable and able to work, already not necessarily even likely, you have to also think ETC can overcome an advantaged competitor from which it's only possible edge is the philosophical value of not having forked to undo the DAO attack (technically ETC is as forkable as ETH, if not more, due to the fewers users and smaller hashing supporting it).
ETC inherits all of the riskiest parts of Ethereum (competition against Bitcoin, competition against other new coins and projects, scalability issues, technical challenges) and it does so with a 25x hashing disadvantage to Ethereum and a 25x price disadvantage and I would guess about a similar if not greater disparity in terms of people involved. On top of that dapps will not work on both in a way that is safe and honestly probably not at all if they have to interact in any with the physical world or world outside Ethereum. This goes for both Maker and Digix, both of whom have stated that they will not support the unforked chain. No devs (or maybe de minimis support?), no dapps, few people, little hashing, no price.
The biggest thing ETC has going for it is the support of people in the Bitcoin world who have been the most hostile towards Ethereum and called it and everyone altcoin a shitcoin. How valuable is that support? How long does it last if ETC starts succeeding and challenging BTC in their minds?
Glad to have you on Steem though, you put in the effort and that's great. What are you Steem thoughts so far? Is it sustainable? Would you buy Steem and Power it up or not? If not, why?
So that 25x price disadvantage is now down to only 5x, within two days of me having written the article. Don't mistake a strong looking opening for a sure victory.
Second, I have more to learn about Steem. I have read the white paper, but need to re-read it. I have no problem with a market cap of $250 million-$300 million though, as a social network with a rapidly growing user base would easily be valued in this range in the venture capital world.
Do you have a strong understanding of how it works at the blockchain level and with the Steem Dollar tokens?