RE: charles hoskinson's thoughts on the dao
I think a misconception about Ethereum is that it shouldn't care. This is a misconception about what Ethereum actually is vs what marketing claimed it could be. Ethereum is actually no different from what Bitshares was which ultimately behind all the protocols, code, smart contracts, is just a community of people. The purpose of the code is to serve the people rather than the people serve the code.
In Bitcoin you can have the protocol be completely agnostic to people because Bitcoin only has to do one thing right and it's priority is the transfer of value from one place to another in an uncensored manner. Ethereum on the other hand had the goal of being a world computer or in other words a state machine. If Ethereum is to ever become a computer then it will need a way at the root level to kill a malfunctioned or rogue app or smart contract.
They should have marketed it different. Turing complete scripting language. Decentralized applications. Decentralized computer. With decentralized governance on top with Proof of Stake. The switch to Proof of Stake creates a situation where the integrity of Ethereum's evolutionary trajectory is at risk due to the very large percentage of stolen Ether. The Ethereum network will be owned by whomever owns the stakes and this means eventually to fork or not to fork will be decided in a stakeholder vote similar to how Bitshares with DPOS has an emergency ability to map the current state of the blockchain where all stakeholders are simply mirrored onto a future chain. This happened with the move from BitsharesX to Bitshares 2.0 and with Ethereum some similar process could happen and probably has to happen if Ethereum is going to evolve. The fact that Bitcoin cannot do this is a limitation of Bitcoin which Ethereum does not have and the different purposes behind the two different species of blockchain technology should mean they have different priorities.
If Ethereum is going to be a decentralized computer then the users have to be able to trust it. This means smart contracts have to be reliable as the primary or main principle and immutability of the blockchain is the secondary principle. This is because it's extremely dangerous to have unreliable smart contracts on an immutable blockchain. If Ethereum chooses immutability then anyone who has serious knowledge of information security or computer science will see that smart contracts on Ethereum will never be reliable. They will always have bugs, and all trust would have to go into technicians such as programmers, security researchers, etc, resulting in technocracy. If on the other hand the community can hard fork if they lose trust in their government of technicians such as programmers, security researchers, etc, then you have a more community controlled platform where stakeholders whomever they may be will have the final say.