This was posted by one of my friends and I have his permission to share it, it was his last post before putting his major Ethereum based smart contract startup on hiatus:
I'm just going to post this one last message on the topic, I feel we all each are starting to understand each other's positions. We may disagree but at least we can't say we didn't try to understand each others position to the best of our ability.
I understand why people want to do the hard fork, really I get the point of refunding people who lost out to Slockit's incompetence. A lot of them believed in Ethereum and wanted to support it and losing that money will not allow them to support it through investment.
I think where we are not connecting maybe is: we either have (a) a network capable of running unstoppable applications or (b) a network that can stop an application if enough political capital is gained.
People here are proposing this may be the foundation of a new model for an Internet interface, web3, I'm not a big fan of the name and think a better client could be made and I have been working on one. I agree that there is a potential for a new way to develop a conception of how the Internet can be structured in a more decentralized way.
If we are going to agree this could possibly be that, a new possibly improved form of Internet. It must not be allowed to have its applications be stopped and we can not start putting political code in the protocol.
If this is a new Internet, ask yourself would we ever let someone modify the TCP/IP protocol to specifically add in politics that benefit a select group of people? Even if it was a new concept, that would not justify building in censorship tools. We should be equally as outraged at the concept with Ethereum if anyone is going to take it seriously.
If this is as important as everyone here agrees it is, we should not be compromising something with this much importance's integrity so quickly into the life of it.
Yes, 150 million is a lot of money, but please let me try to explain why its not meaningless loss.
It shows Ethereums price to manipulate the blockchain is above 150 million. You must have more than 150 million and hopefully much much more , you can't change anything for political reasons and the economic wall functions to prevent changes to the ledger. The blockchains value relates to this being very high because more money can be safely stored. In the case of Ethereum, this becomes proof the design requires more than 150 million to manipulate it, which would be assuring everyone they could trust it for more serious things, like a possibly a decentralized news organization or other structures that would require a lot of trust.
Honestly if you want a network with a flexible database, it may be better to do a delegated proof of stake and have a permission DB. It would be much faster, easier to shard and more efficient than the current version of Ethereum, Ethereum is interesting because it is using a blockchain. The blockchains entire design is to create an economic wall to prevent anyone from modifying the ledger so we can all trust it. Everyone regardless of culture can trust they can use it and its equitable as we can engineer it. It remains a country neutral global computer that can be something to connect everyone regardless of culture.
Yes, it sucks that "bad" guys go free, but its the same sacrifice in a modern justice system, we have to allow some guilty people walk to ensure no one is wrongly punished. We don't want to even give the chance for a contract being wrongly punished and shut down because the majority of shareholders want to program their political system/beliefs into the protocol level of the new Internet. It should just be a piece of engineering, politics should be on a higher level.
What makes Bitcoin so valuable is that its not manipulatable, which for a currency also means not counterfeitable. We can calculate right now roughly how much money it would take to try to attack the network based on electricity use. It is a very large number and growing. If we do this we are setting the price to change the ledger in Ethereum, and thats just a bad use of a blockchain.
If we hard fork, we are setting a price, even if it changes over time, we are saying if you gain x amount of political capital you can change the ledger and add politics, and that level of politics should not be built into the protocol.
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