[Everlag]

From diving in, it looks like the contract backing a smart wallet implementation had a vulnerability/bug/design flaw allowing an arbitrary actor to kill it[0]. It looks like these contracts are treated as a shared library so the contract being killed means any wallet depending on it is bricked.

The solution here seems to be a hard fork of Ethereum to allow revival of that problem contract. This seems unpalatable as, well, avoiding extensive human intervention is a key idea in cryptocoins.

Disclaimer: I got off the cryptocoin train awhile back so if I've mistaken anything, please point it out.

[0] https://github.com/paritytech/parity/issues/6995

[ameliaquining]

It's not the first time Ethereum has hard-forked to roll back a sufficiently bad bug in a smart contract, and it probably won't be the last. They periodically do hard-forks for other reasons as well. Eventually they might declare it 1.0 and stop doing this, but that's not how it's managed today. At this point I think users accept this as a risk of using Ethereum. Of course anyone who doesn't like it is free to try to keep the old chain alive (indeed, Ethereum Classic is still a thing that exists).

[cslarson]

Ethereum Classic also hard forks in order to make changes and other upgrades to it's protocol.

Ethereum has not yet hard forked to enact this proposal. At the moment it looks very unlikely to gain the support needed.