I understand why no one could have have developed a competing fork of Bitcoin (needing some coordination to bootstrap the project), but I don't understand why someone couldn't just develop a competing fork of Etherium. I don't see a network effect.
If its going to be an open source project, why not just wait for them to code it, then fork it into 'Free Etherium' (no organization, no premine, merged mining, bitcoin-coinbase-schedule, ppc-mining, etc)? People would only have to switch once.
It seems obvious to me.
Is there anyone who knows econ with the Etherium team?