[captainmuon]

I don't understand the rage of some people against this decision. Cryptocurrency should be about free association of individuals and not about blindly following a flawed protocol that just happened to be the first implemented. If the consensus or vast majority vote is to upgrade the protocol, then that is what should be done. If everybody decides to stop using etherium and issue IOUs in the value of the currency they held, and use that as money, also fine. If they decide unanimously to change the protocol to give one person all the money, so they can build a huge goat idol, then that's the collective decision.

No doubt the contracts and the protocol will be refined many times until they convey the intention of the community better.

The beautiful thing about a correctly implemented cryptocurrency is that single actors cannot act against the majority will of the community. But that doesn't mean we can't shut down our computers for a minute to reconsider the rules of the game, if we find a new consensus.

[allthetime]

That's the thing though, they aren't changing the protocol, they are just reversing the transactions that fed the DAO. The DAO was flawed, not Ethereum, and now Ethereum's stability and promise of immutability are being sacrificed so that a bunch of people (including the lead devs of ethereum) who made a bad, uninformed investment don't have to lose their money.

The 'consensus' was not by a vast majority either, unless you consider 5% a vast majority.

[captainmuon]

Well, but the vast majority is carrying the decision by following the fork / rollback, right? If just 5% of there network does the fork, shouldn't the 95% be able to continue with the old version (and the fork would become effectively worthless)? At least that's how it would work with bitcoin.

If the system allows 5% of users (or computing power) to make arbitrary changes, then that is the problem.

If I'm correctly informed, the cause was not a bad investment, but a bug/loophole in the contract that allowed people to steal etherium. (Of course you could take the code-legalistic position and say whatever the original code did, was the contract, even with bugs, and if people invested, they accepted these bugs as part of the agreement. But then I raise you this: the features of etherium that allow people to make changes to contracts are also part of the agreement! So if you say they shouldn't have invested in a buggy contact, tough luck, then I can say tough luck you invested in a malleble system :-))

If there was a bug (unexpected functionality) in the specification, then a certain quorum of users should be able to change the spec to match group expectations, even retroactively. I consider that to be a feature, not a bug.

[objectiveariel]

Could you please let us know where you got that 5% figure from? I thought (according to the latest post on Ethereum's blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/07/15/to-fork-or-not-to-fork/) that the voting was done just on http://carbonvote.com/

[kbody]

Actually it's ~3.5%. Meaning about 3.5% of the total ETH supply has been used to vote.

[captainmuon]

Do we know much of the user base / computing power that corresponds to? And how many users abstained from voting?