Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's because he wrote this: > or the people running the network decide upon a hard fork? which screams malice aforethought to people. The idea is that Ethereum had a hard fork which has divided people across two sides. To average people, you can get them to take any side depending upon how you compose the questions. You ask a non-techie: 1. What would you think if a company like Venmo decides to revert donations you…
I actually thought twice about writing that because it does seem a little unfair. The Eth guys didn't want to do that hard fork and I'm sure they have no intentions of ever having one again. But that was the case before the first fork. There was no indication that was going to happen then, either. so if it's five years from now, more people are relying on Ethereum and something we can't anticipate requires (truly or…
I have seen this common fallacy which exists across all areas (Especially around security), but the best example of this was when Apple revealed that it received orders from FBI to help them unlock a terrorist's iPhone.
Majority of the people were making arguments such as "But what is it to stop FBI from using this special software to crack other people's iPhones", which misses the point that if FBI can force Apple to issue a custom ROM which allows them to crack into a phone, then the security exploit already exists, it doesn't start to exist when Apple signs such a ROM.
Same goes here, if hard forking to alter the ledger is 'breaking immutability' then all blockchains are not immutable, they don't start becoming immutable the moment they fork the blockchain.
Take it another way, if you could go back in time and convince Ethereum community to not hard fork, is Ethereum blockchain more immutable in that timeline? In fact, you don't have to go that far, currently there exists a fork of Ethereum blockchain which didn't decide to go with the hard fork, is Ethereum Classic more immutable than Ethereum main chain?
The fact is the DAO hardfork was made possible because of one reason:
The DAO locked the funds of the hacker into a smart contract for 30 days. If the hacker got spending access to his Ethers, then this hard fork would not have been possible because it would mean reverting very legitimate transactions where people have transacted goods/services for Ether (not to mention, community would not have gone for the hard fork if that were the case).
> Seems perfectly fair and not an invalid question if we are talking about people in the real world using Ethereum and not just a bunch of early adopters. Is it not?
People in real world, if they fully understand the concept of Hard fork, are even more pro-hard fork than majority of Ethereum users. Remember, the non-blockchain world is as far from immutability as possible. Nearly all credit card companies offer reversible transactions, nearly all ecommerce sites offer you ability to get refunded if something goes wrong.
A bunch of early adopters are the only one who cry 'immutability'. We come from the software world, so we know why immutability is a desirable thing, but to an average person mutability or immutability is a meaningless distinction. They all expect mutability to the default.