This scenario is entirely unrecognizable from what happened one week ago.
That should be obvious. It was in fact nothing like it, by intent.
I'm not sure what the rest of your comment was about. It was too long for me to read carefully, clearly being off topic to this post.
Rats. I was ready to go over proximate cause.
In a nutshell:
The two by themselves do nothing. The two together, where the fork is used to create leverage and the leverage is used to justify the fork, creates a new situation that crosses over to being objectively wrong.
Who do you think initiated the "negotiation"? If you are thinking it was the developer of the embryonic fork code or anyone talking about the possibility of such a fork happening, you would be wrong.
In point of fact, at the time the initiation of the fork discussion by Johan, Ned had been MIA for weeks. I doubt that anyone had any expectation of talking to him at all. Any discussion or negotiation took place only after Ned contacted some of the people discussing the possibility of a fork (one might venture to invoke "Alice" here, had the situations not be so completely and utterly different, at least from that point of a requested discussion forward) and asked them what sort of action he might be able to take to discourage it.
When someone asks you "What can I do to discourage you from doing X?", X being a thing which is not an act of violence or a crime of any kind, answering the question is not a threat, nor extortion, nor piracy, not heist, nor theft.