The hard fork made Ethereum lose its trustlessness, and Slock.it should be blamed for this

It now appears that the results of the Ethereum hard fork have left Ethereum in chaos.

Much of the focus has been on ensuring that investors in The DAO can recover funds that were stolen by hackers through a code vulnerability. Creating an 'alternative reality' to pretend that the incident never happened is taking away the 'trustless' factor of Ethereum's 'decentralized trustless ecosystem'.

Ethereum is no longer trustless by default

Looking at the consequences of the Ethereum hard fork from a rational perspective, the aftermath of the hard fork will be quite severe. Ethereum developers took it upon themselves to ensure that the hard fork would happen. Even so, they gave the community the option to vote 'Yes' or 'No'. However, because no one knew how many people voted - and how many of those votes were real - it didn't matter, and the hard fork was still executed.

At its core, the Ethereum hard fork created a different 'reality' in which The DAO was never hacked due to a bug in the source code. While it is understandable that investors should be repaid, that should be done with funds from the Slock.it team (who are responsible for The DAO code) and not at the expense of Ethereum's trustlessness. Unfortunately, when using immature technology and throwing money at it, problems like this arise.

Politics is to blame for this hard fork . One of the side effects of politics is that the ecosystem created does not have the word 'trustless'. Regardless of which semantics one wants to use to describe the situation, this decision taken by Ethereum developers will forever tarnish the reputation of Ethereum.

While most Ethereum investors don’t really care about this reputation and just want their money back, the Ethereum community should. When all of The DAO’s funds are sorted out, there will be about $6.5 million left to be distributed. A group of trustees will be responsible for making sure that money goes where it’s supposed to go. A trustee in a trustless decentralized cryptocurrency? That’s a really strange combination.

Despite the hard fork, some innocent people ended up losing funds, however for some reason the big investors managed to recover all of their funds. At this point, no one can honestly say that Ethereum is a trustless ecosystem anymore, unless they want to fool themselves. The fun is yet to come, but it is certain that Ethereum will lose some support.