You're late to this discussion by almost six years, when it became clear to the Ethereum team and the people running Ethereum nodes that code isn't law, but consensus is. Consensus is indeed the "higher power beyond the code". By the way, the same thing applies to Bitcoin, and to every other decentralized "crypto" project out there.
Code is nothing but a way to implement a certain set of rules a majority agrees with. And the object of agreement can indeed change over time. This does not threaten the decentralized nature of the Ethereum network, or its capabilities as a core tool for all sorts of decentralized instruments that simply were not possible with anything that came before.
The Ethereum team must be well aware they are late by about 240 years. This reads like how government power is derived from the consent of the governed, but with some of the words switched out.
You are right! Bitcoin and Ethereum (in its first PoW phase) work in the same way. The "wave of consensus" described in the Bitcoin white paper is the true innovation that enables this kind of decentralized government. But the core principle is the same as that present in all agreements made in human history. This is just a new way to agree to things, but let's not discount it much, it's still a true innovation that enables things not possible before.
I hope we are saved by the crypto folks aversion to existing institutions such that they never mingle their ideas with the our present legal system to mechanically enforce their social constructs. A base under the control of a crypto superstructure is a form of hell I wish to avoid.
To be clear, by “wave of consensus” you mean consensus as defined by having the most CPU power.
From the Bitcoin paper:
> They vote with their CPU power, expressing their acceptance of valid blocks by working on extending them and rejecting invalid blocks by refusing to work on them. Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this consensus mechanism.
The "wave of consensus" refers to the fact that a decentralized network cannot have a definition of "current state" for everyone in the network. There's some sort of "undisputed state" because as blocks pile up, it becomes more and more impossible to alter the older blocks and also generate the amount of blocks required to overtake the original chain. That's the wave: new blocks propagate on the network, ensuring the older blocks can't ever change, but the newer blocks might be replaced by others in some cases. This is why there's a need to "wait for confirmations" in most crypto transactions.
Code is nothing but a way to implement a certain set of rules a majority agrees with. And the object of agreement can indeed change over time. This does not threaten the decentralized nature of the Ethereum network, or its capabilities as a core tool for all sorts of decentralized instruments that simply were not possible with anything that came before.