[TTPrograms]

"So we now know that contracts on Ethereum mean what they say, unless there is a community consensus that the contract actually means something else"

We always knew this, and we always knew that the same was true of Bitcoin (so-called 51% attack). The only point of note is that there was a coordinated effort to take this option - one which will not likely be possible in a future larger network.

[cjslep]

> The only point of note is that there was a coordinated effort to take this option - one which will not likely be possible in a future larger network.

Saying "this is possible in Bitcoin" despite its large size then try to downplay Ethereum's same risk when it gets bigger just seems an odd way to justify Ethereum's value to me (an outsider to all cryptocurrencies). Between the two, Ethereum has the proven history of generating the coordinated effort. Bitcoin does not. So if both are the same size, the cryptocurrency's specific community and history is a factor in its value. I would rather avoid the smart contracts that Ethereum has as it seems like a liability.

[TTPrograms]

It's not an argument for justifying its value, it's an argument for dismissing devaluation simply based on the hard fork. Network size advantages could end up being temporary, so the remainder of your argument is based on the premise that Bitcoin retains its size advantage.

The remaining question is if you think that the actions of a developer and early-adopter community around one of those technologies in its infancy should affect it's long-term valuation and capability. This seems silly to me. It would be like if Reddit wiped out everyone's karma when there were 100 users and then debating if this meant Reddit was no longer valuable - of course not. In this case it's even stronger, because having large numbers of users implicitly makes these sorts of events more difficult to pull off.

[wyager]

And yet, the Bitcoin community seems to stand behind their words and has yet to fold on their principles.

In effect, people actually trust Bitcoin to be a "source of truth", and that transactions won't go away just because a small oligopoly of developers decided they didn't like the way a perfectly legitimate transaction went down.

[splintercell]

"small oligopoly"?? Majority of Ether holders supported the fork.

[zdkl]

It's easy to get the feeling that the "default support" setting may have helped that, from a casual following of the ethereum scene

[wyager]

No, they just didn't care enough to make the effort to protest.