Ethereum is choosing its identity

Ethereum has an important decision to make: to fork or not to fork. Whatever they choose it will irreversibly define their identity and also create space for an alternative platform to follow the path Ethereum chooses not to follow - and this might have important consequences for Rootstock, Lisk and BitShares.

Right now there are two camps and a growing rift among Ethereum community.

The "ideological" camp: Ethereum as immutable smart contracts platform

The main argument here is that immutability is the foundation of Ethereum and the very essence of smart contracts. Without immutability the idea becomes reduced to automated contracts, which could be much more efficiently manged and executed on a centralized platform. The argument goes that immutability and permissionlessness are the main value propositions for serious businesses planning to build upon Ethereum and without those two features Ethereum has no competitive advantage over legacy systems. Also, granting miners the role of arbitrating disputes or interpreting contracts is a serious violation of the blockchain concept.

Below there are some excerpts supporting this view, taken from a Reddit thread:

There is no point in a smart contract that can be forked and rolled back on a whim. In that case you should just write a paper contract and call the police and a lawyer.

If smart contracts can be rolled back there is literally no point in them or ETH just use javascript to write programs and a quill and some parchment to write agreements.

You don't need a decentralized blockchain to do automation. A single computer with a database can do that. The point of the blockchain is immutability. If you don't want that, then why waste energy on such an inefficient system?

Without irreversibility, Ethereum is just a very slow, inefficient and expensive version of centralized platforms.

In the world of smart contracts, there are no bugs or features. No right and wrong, good or evil. There's just code. Whether this is a viable approach to contracts is debatable, this is actually what the whole to-fork or not-to-fork fuss is about. If the decision ends up being that this way of doing contracts is not viable, then smart contracts simply don't make sense anymore.

A system based on decentralized social governance and subjectivity could be quite interesting, but it's certainly not what Ethereum was meant to be as far as I know.

Depends on if you want Ethereum to be Litecoin 2.0 or an actual smart contracts execution engine. Good luck with getting people to build contracts of any significant value on a platform that rolls back any contract that acts conversely to the community consensus.

If miner consensus means interpreting contracts, no one would trade the normal legal system with known judges, lawyers and juries for an anonymous one.

Miner consensus has to do with including transactions into blocks choosing a major blockchain, not judging morality or interpreting contracts. There is a big difference between passively processing transactions and actively making decisions related to people's holdings. Once you cross that line the situation changes forever.

Miner or staker consensus is a part of every cryptocurrency. But once those parties take action that erases the perceived immutability of the blockchain, the characteristics of that blockchain are fundamentally changed from that point on.

If the community is to judge subjective things like contract failure, good faith, and what action to take to produce a result that they feel appropriate, then the whole thing seems over engineered to an absurd degree. The community can do as it wishes of course, but perceived immutability and permissionlessness are two blockchain characteristics that differentiate things like Ethereum from systems actively governed by human intervention. You can throw that away, but once that line is crossed those characteristics are not able to be restored again. So whatever happens here will be a defining moment for Ethereum.

The "pragmatic" camp: Ethereum as automated but reversible contracts platform

The main argument here is that the ability to reverse smart contracts that violate the intent and good faith will promote mainstream adoption, not hinder it. Ethereum's goal is not just to create a new Bitcoin, but to improve society and this goal should take precedence over technological ideaologism. Technology exists only to solve real world problems, not create them. There needs to be a safety net for extreme cases, otherwise most users will be too scared to use the platform. Also, it's argued that a hardfork is decentralized in its nature, as the miners have the ability not to accept it.

Below there are some excerpts supporting this view, taken from a Reddit thread:

Can lawyers automate contracts? No they cant. We need tools to invalidate transactions that hurt the network. This will make us stronger not weaker. We are not BTC, we are not opposed to the financial system, we are conjoint.

Expecting code to be unexploitable is irrational. Smart contracts work where they execute the intention of the parties, but when they clearly don't (such as a hack - i.e. using a system in a way it was not intended) there needs to be some kind of safeguard in place. Perhaps you can absorb the risk for smaller contracts, but you can't have a $150m fund reliant entirely on software with no safeguards. Nobody would invest in that fund.

Ethereum is not an ideological construct. It is a technology. It seems a few people wound up in the Ethereum sub mistaking it for bitcoin. The libertarian / ancap ideological religiosity is getting old, and if the hard fork does nothing but get rid of that, we can call it a win.

Smart contract are only a way to automate social contracts. And like paper contracts, they are not perfect and can have loopholes. And when a loopholes with such severe consequence is used that it threatens the whole platform, it seems logical that it can collectively be put down.

Users will never adopt a platform that can work in a way completely contrary to what they intended and expected. Users need to trust that their funds are safe from tampering and theft (whether its an exploit in the protocol, or in the contract). If there's no way to fix bugs on a platform, then users will only adopt that platform if they can be absolute certain that it is bug-free (and that degree of certainty is near impossible).

This is a plus for the mainstream, who are not ideologically bound to the idea of contractual immutability. People want to know that there is some kind of safety net for extreme cases like this. And there is such a safety net, and it has always been built into the Ethereum network (and the bitcoin network, for that matter).

The overhead is to ensure that contracts produce a deterministic result without opportunity for fraud or theft. In some edge cases, when the contract fails to do what it was designed to do and allows theft and widespread harm to people acting in good faith, then it is within the rights of the community to take action.