These days I've been discussing a lot about whether Ethereum should hardfork to refund investors, because of theft which happened by exploiting a flaw that was in software layer over Ethereum, not Ethereum itself. Yes I was DAO token holder and some will say my opinion is biased because of, but I'm completely sure I would have same opinion otherwise.
The rule of blockhain based proof-of-work system is transactions and rules can be changed if majoity of miners agrees by voting with their hash power. In that sense, absolutely nothing is broken by hardfoking for "greater cause", actually politics of Ethereum ecosystem didn't change at all. Miners do have their interests and incentives, but behind them, there is consumer base which has its own interests and incentives. Finding the balance between these two interests is the key for successful cryptocurrency.
Opponents of Ethereum's hardforking to bail-out investors have few I would say reasonable remarks that should be considered, but after spending some time thinking about them I came to conclusion it's just a hardcore purist ideology displayed and many of them are probably Ethereum opponents FUDding around for their own cause. They disregard situation on the field, disregard the fact that it's good if such a massive theft can be elegantly reversed while respecting miner's voting power. So this is a clear case where miners acknowledged their incentives of hardforking (saving investors) and acted accordingly. After all, we see ETH market price recovering after the hardfork which means that was okay decision. No, there won't be long-term negative effect, many will soon put this hardfork in history not even thinking about it, and most of new investors won't be aware of it, they will only see Ethereum being alive and in quite good shape. After all, my faith in Ethereum is stronger after this swift reaction and successful hardfork. And I'm sure many other's too feel the same.
Hardfork opponents said: "Yeah, it's Fiat 2.0, this is the same as banks were bailed out in 2008, we fight against that system and now we're applying the same fraudulent system ourselves". I say: "Wrong! I have news for you: It was done by miners consent. Investors were bailed out at noone's expense. In 2008, banksters were bailed-out at people's expense, and the process was completely political, contrary to regular miner's hardforking of Ethereum. So we can't really compare those two cases.
And if you still think forking was wrong...... then go, make your own fork of Ethereum or any other coin, with whatever policy change and improvements you want and try to fork it. Or if someone stole huge pile of coins from you, then you can try reversing it. I wish you a good luck, you would most probably see it's not that easy and probably impossible.
Hardforking is new paradigm - a good feature of cryptocurrencies, more feature than a bug, actually it's not the bug at all. It's useful and that's another advantage of cryptocurrency to fiat money.
Being a hardcore purist usually does not pay off. I think we have a clear case of purist ideology applied as a FUD tool these days. And thankfully, they failed. If only we could fix Bitcoin this easily... But that's topic for whole another blog post...
Ethereum's fork was done by overwhelming support of miners, consumers and developers for a good reason. Nothing is broken here, nothing to see here anymore, please continue to make Ethereum system great as it is. Cheers!