How We Should Look at the Ethereum Hard Fork

I believe the recent Ethereum hard fork is teaching a lot of people about what hard forking means and the relationship between blockchain systems and the communities that run them. These new blockchain systems allow large groups to act as one in decision making and action.

In the case of a protocol-level technical bug, hard forks are trivial and the old chain will almost certainly die. Ethereum's hard fork is a little special. If you aren't already familiar, the largest Ethereum smart contract that raised more money than any other crowdfunding event in history, called the DAO, was drained of its ether by an attacker because of a discovered bug in the contract code (there was nothing wrong with Ethereum itself.)

Some people are arguing that this hard fork was a bad decision because it broke the basic philosophy of Ethereum which is a platform to run smart contracts indefinitely, without censorship or downtime. The idea is that contracts people thought would run forever and were being worked on, can suddenly be crippled by a hard fork. First of all, lets notice that those very first contracts are still running and probably will continue to run (on both chains).

Most people invested in Ethereum also invested, large amounts, in the DAO. So it should make sense why the majority wanted the hard fork. The majority deciding to hard fork does not break the immutability as everyone thinks it does. People underestimate the flexibility and control we share with the blockchain: aspects and existence of these blockchain systems exist IF the majority allows it. Smart contract immutability is no exception. Choosing to stick with ETC for the immutability is ignorant to this fact. This is probably the only time which the majority would vote against immutability of a particular contract, but it's obvious why it's a special case.

Ethereum is the majority supported chain. ETC despite being still valuable, is an ethereum-altcoin and we are likely going to see more of those soon. We have seen successful cooperation between Bitcoin and other altcoins, I think we can see the same with Ethereum (although it will be even more interesting!)