Mathematically, the Ethereum miners can easily roll back the DAO. Do they have the right to roll back the DAO?
This is the crucial point. Instinctively I felt something like this but I was unable to put it into sensible words. And Curtis Yarvin came up with the words. Such a relief. I'm so grateful.
Hard-fork proponents say: "Since miners have the power to do a hard-fork, everything is fine when they do it". I felt it was wrong but couldn't really argue with that. Fortunately Curtis Yarvin spotted the crux of the matter: indeed, the miners have the power to hard-fork but it does not mean they have the right to do it. By doing so they break the very fundamental consensus. It's a military coup. These things happen but still they are lawless:
A rollback is a lawless act. This does not make it a wrongful act. It simply cannot be judged as an act of law. Rather, it is an act of war. And judged as an act of war, a DAO rollback is exactly right.
Here is another perfect comparison:
Just as the miners have the power to rule any blockchain, the military has the power to rule any country.
And another brilliant observation:
Having a central government isn't inconsistent with the ultimate objective of eliminating central government.
Even a government composed of a single person is not a bad thing, as long as this person has no reason to execute his power. In blockchain terms, having very few block producers is OK, as long as their incentives are perfectly aligned with the network incentives. This way block producers do have enormous power but never actually use it.
This is absoluty illuminating for me.