Well lets look at what happened: a hacker found a loop hole in a contract and exploited it. Not only that he stole some money, but it could affect the future of the project but letting an ill intented hacker having up to 14% of ethereum total tokens would put the project at risk. What signal would give this to the future projects made on ethereum ? You want to bring blockchain and contracts into mainstream but then you show investors / companies no support at all ? They cannot embrace a new technology with a whole new bag of risks that comes with it if they get no support. Ethereum is still beta / developing and showing potential investors / companies that the project / miners / stakers would back them up by voting if something like this happens, especially in beta mode.
Hard fork is not a bad thing unless theres no consensus. This is not bitcoin china where 95% of the hashrate is controled by 10 people, with 2 of them controlling 50%, to argue that the consensus consists of 3-4 people's interest. It consists of thousands of people/miners interest, and their interest is for the project to succeed.
Yes, what happened was bad, especially short them, and theres a very small risk it could kill the project. But if it survives, and 99% will, it will become stronger.
Ofc there are alot of fear mongers, some of them bitcoin maximalist who fear ethereum, some shorters who were hoping it would go to 1$, hoping to make a 10x profit and now are desperate because the price actually holds.
Let us put this on a row:
- ethereum is in beta test mode, so anything goes. Is this the place to have projects with a crowd funding of hundreds of millions ?
- a single person having up to 14% of ethereum is visibly a problem, then why was a single project (the DAO) a few times larger ?
- the value proposition of ethereum and smart contracts was "the code is the law" but it isn't because you have too much money invested in a too big to fail project IN BETA TEST MODE ?
So then you guys "voted" to put a funny hack in the code to do away with "the code is the law", and to do away with the "immutability of the chain", which were exactly the two value propositions of ethereum.
Instead of the dictate of democracy where a majority imposes its will (especially its will to kill the basic tenets on which the system is supposed to be build), a fork is way, way better: those that go with "too big to fail and bailout" have ETH, and those that want to stick with "the code is the law" and immutability have ETC. Everyone happy.
