TechFlow news: Delphi Labs Legal Director @lex_node shared his views on protocol client upgrades. He believes there is a misconception that protocol client upgrades are voluntary and decided by the community.
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Due to the existence of RWAs (especially stablecoins), minority-opposition hard forks won't work. This means that when significant assets—particularly stablecoins—are involved, opposition from a minority cannot successfully block an upgrade.
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Rejecting an upgrade means rejecting all future upgrades. If a community rejects an upgrade, it must provide an alternative core development team to maintain and improve the protocol. On this point, @lex_node believes Ethereum's core developers may not fully recognize their power and responsibility.
He also pointed out that some believe Ethereum’s approach to protocol upgrades is better than Bitcoin’s hard fork model, but he considers this view mistaken. He explained that Bitcoin and Ethereum are different: Bitcoin has no RWAs, miners compete with each other, the chain cannot slash or damage ASIC mining hardware, etc. Therefore, on Bitcoin, intense user competition and differing stakeholder interests lead to different upgrade dynamics.
