... will go along with whatever "the official release" does ...
I'm questioning the advisability of the notion of official in this context. What are y'all gonna do if a personal crisis obliges Deb to suddenly and completely disengage? In essence, any claim of official simply weakens decentralisation and renders the operation of the coin more vulnerable to interference and/or disruption. An ecosystem, if it can be achieved, would be more usefully robust and as is common with group activity, the more raucous, the more useful so the vigorous expression of (well-supported) dissenting opinion is a good sign.
Instead of voting, we could simply have people make a series of forks, and have everyone run whichever fork they like best.
Bitcoin's running two forks currently (or was until recently) and multiple forks don't pose any theoretical issues AFAIK, so what remains is just a matter of discovering what passes for practicality.
The point of having a provably fair on-chain vote is to avoid that mess.
That would be an economist's definition of fair. My perspective is that this is a sociological issue with a very different definition of fair.
One insight that I've had confirmed by this discussion: the functioning of any altcoin community is seriously hampered by the absence of a reliable mirror.
What do you mean by 'mirror' here? I'm sorry, but you lost me.
It's a notion pertinent to the social psychology of the context, I made a mistake in mentioning it. Basically, I was just hand-wavily referring to a means of promulgating the social mores of the group. Identity cannot develop sanely in isolation; this is true for the individual and for a social group. For any significant degree of social cohesion to be achieved, group members need to know how a group member is typically supposed to think/behave
in order that they may compare themselves against this norm, this is the same factor that lies at the root of
pluralistic ignorance and to a degree is in play in this discussion. Just observing the lacuna, thassall.
Cheers
Graham