Is Ethereum ever going to just work? Or is Tezos going to eat Ethereum's lunch?
The news is out that due to a programmer error 300 million in Ether may have been locked up. Lockup has occurred this time in a way which made the funds completely in inaccessible. As I said in my previous posts, the developers have to put the individual user first on matters of ethics in my opinion. Are individual users of Ethereum going to be effected by this? How many and which wallets are destroyed? How many ICOs/projects are to be affected?
This to me highlights a major problem which I identified in Ethereum prior to the DAO occurring. In Ethereum we have to trust the developers to produce perfect code in a smart contract language which is immature. Ethereum due to it's design and due to the design of solidity, but more importantly due to the fact that there aren't very well written standard libraries for the most common tasks (such as for a multi-signature wallet), we end up in situations where bugs can cost potentially billions of dollars.
Without secure libraries Ethereum is doomed. The fate of Ethereum in my opinion will depend on the ability of developers to create secure libraries for basic functionality and multi-signature functionality is one of the most basic and common functions Ethereum could provide. Vitalik has a point that when Ethereum was less mature the DAO would have taken down the entire project but then we have this happen? Depending on which projects are affected it could be more ethical to hard fork.
Should there or shouldn't there be a hard fork this time?
If a list can be compiled of all the projects effected then we can get some idea of how many individual users might be effected. In the case of the DAO the vast majority of users would have been affected either due to the hacker selling down the price, or due to there being no funds to develop projects because so much was put into the DAO. This case is ethically a bit tricky so it might not be a good idea to hard fork this time if it can be resolved in a different way.
What do the users think is best? On this I'm still undecided on whether it should cause or should not cause a hard fork. At the moment I lean against a hard fork but $300 million is a lot of money and how many projects will be stopped?