The old version stayed around but (essentially) nobody wanted to use it. If they had, the forked version would be worthless. That is the difference. A cryptocurrency fork cannot succeed without the consent of the community. No one is compelled to use it the way that you are compelled to accept the decisions of a regulator.

Well, the consent of some of the community.

Potentially far, far less than a majority of the community, even, considering it's not one person, one vote.

yeah this sounds like direct plutocracy - money votes, not people.

Which I guess is a cricitism of crypto in general - if it were to be adopted widely, the rich can gang up any time on the rest of us and do an 50% vote to rewrite the votes - right now the 1% owns about 30% of wealth in the US - not a stretch to see it go to 50%

If the community of people in this country didn't like regulation, all they'd need to do is vote in someone who would remove it.

The fact that they haven't, or that there aren't even headwinds for such a thing implies that they are more-or-less fine with it.

If people disagree with one particular regulation, you think it’s possible to vote someone in to fix that issue in isolation? I don’t think you have thought about this very deeply, either that or you’re completely ignorant of the political environment you inhabit.

You’re also misusing “headwinds”.

Which country? Mind you, at least 50% of population are in countries where votes do not work the way you’d think they do.

Even in US, how easy would it be to change zoning regulation to promote more housing.

they got feared into it by fear of being left behind. Pretending that majority can always make the good choice (even for their own benefit!) is, well, just look at state of US politics.

And it's WORSE, because there is no one person one vote, the amount of money have is directly proportional to the "voting power" in crypto currency.

when the core devs lose money, the rules change.

It's been nine years since the chain split, which happened within the first year. No irregular changes have been made since then. Two major hacks caused over a hundred million dollars in losses to Parity, a company founded by one of the core devs. That dev lobbied heavily for rescue, and the community refused.

Bitcoin also made an irregular change, a year and a half into its history.

It just shows that the decision making is very centralized and failure of ETC shows that the community is not interested in a true immutable ledger.

No True Scotsman , Crypto edition.

Listen, this is all code running on computers. At the end of the day everyone could choose to shut it down or replace it entirely and they criticism would still be: See not immutable! Eventually entropy makes everything mutable.

Most of the community wanted that fork, and both versions still exist.

The difference with the bank/regulators is you can't really decide, contrary to Ethereum.

The comparison doesn't hold.

The comparison absolutely holds: the Important People With Money decide.

The cryptobros just want to re-invent an alternate world of finance where they are the wealthy oligarchs.

Yet again, no. The "rich people" decided just as everyone did. If you still want to use the old chain, you can. It's still running.

Most people don't want to though, because it doesn't make sense for them : agreeing with "the rich people" don't make you wrong.