and now those same good samaritans that are funding developers start pushing a campaign to engineer a rollback of the blockchain Vitalik style. What would happen?
Nothing, core devs can't do rollback/reorg on the blockchain, only miners can, rollbacks are super expensive (usually cost more than whatever benefit you get from it) and miners who invest their hard-earned money in the space won't even risk going that route, Binance lost 7000
BTC (worth 40M $ at that time) and they didn't get away with a tweet that mentioned the word rollback, let alone trying to actually push that.
If in the future ETF holders become the 99% and 1% are self-custodians
That won't be possible, the majority of
BTC is already in the hands of the people, what's left of it or what those large corps can buy will likely never make a majority, if that happens it means they must spend unrealistic amount of money to acquire them, and if they do -- they would be very careful when attempting anything that might hurt bitcoin and thus hurt their pockets.
IMO, we should not fear those who have skin in the game, people are always worried about miners doing some nasty shit to
BTC which is a stupid assumption given that miners have the most skin in the game, others are worried about core devs (many people already claim core devs are controlled by Blockstream "or is it someone else today"?, to me, all of these entities have skin in the game and have more to lose than to gain if they decide to do anything stupid, if there is anyone we should fear would be those old farts in the government.
I should have said miners and developers. Of course you need the hashrate too, but that can be bought. If ETF-BTC can promise higher valuations, miners may follow, since they are economic actors that seek profit. If the majority of economic activity is happening on ETF-BTC, they may get more from the fees in there. As far as developers, we have developers fucking with our money in the form of Ordinals already. They could also buy people like Elon Musk type PR to pump their hardfork. They could also buy lobbysts to pass laws that outlaw non ETF-BTC for enabling money laundering or whatever. Im sure that's their long term goal with all of this actually. Does anyone seriously think they have approved ETF's if they don't think they can use it to control BTC? Their motto has been "We'll tame Bitcoin" for years now. This is all part of the plan. The question is, if community of actual BTC holders will fall for it. At the end of the day, in any hardfork both sides get shares of each token, so we'll see who dumps on who.