It's yet to be seen, personally I think ETC should win because they are sticking to the good morals of not breaking the chain because of smart contracts going against holder's money.. that is bankster mentality. Let banks fail, let smart contracts fail.

Just a question.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe my eyes are lying to me but I see a few people on here who ABSOLUTELY HATED ETH, who are now ABSOLUTELY LOVING ETH(ETC). The problem I have here is that those haters say that they hated the ETH principle and technology blah blah blah... but the principle and technology blah blah blah... has not changed. ETH(ETC) is still the old ETH, on the same old 'old chain', but now they're arguing for it!!! The very thing they said they hated!!!

I don't get it...

So, did they really hate ETH,
or did they just hate the profit people were making with ETH,
or did they just hate the fact that they didn't create ETH,
or did they just hate the fact that they missed the big bus that was ETH,
or is this just a relic of them still wanting to buy cheap ETH,
or do they still hate ETH so much that they'll buy ETH(ETC) to kill ETH,
or is the enemy of my enemy my friend, therefore ETH(ETC),
or is it something else and I've completely missed the actual factual point?

Can anyone explain why 'the intelligent ones' who used to hate ETH and argued with such vitriol against ETH are now buying and supporting ETH(ETC)?? I thought 'the intelligent ones' were immutable!

This industry is pure fiction!

You seem to have missed the important point, that calling someone a thief because an act he committed is theft, is depending on the law system under which the action is taking place.

As such, under the "law of the code" the hacker was doing legal things.  The same action, most probably seen under human state (which state?) / human morality/sense of fairness law, is most probably seen as "theft".

Consider the following situation, to illustrate that:
in country A, there's a law that says that if you are laid off from your job for other reasons than misconduct (say, economic reasons) you are entitled to take the personal tools that your employer gave you (computer, smartphone....), with you when you leave.
in country B, there's no such law.

Now suppose that Joe gets fired from company C because C made a bad deal and has to face serious losses (a bad deal with which Joe has nothing to do, but the CEO of the company can't keep all personnel and has decided to lay off Joe).

Joe puts his company's telephone and laptop in a cardbox which he takes home.  Is Joe a thief ?

In country A, he isn't and acted according to the law.
In country B, he's an outright thief and stole company property.

In the DAO, it was said that the code is the law, and according to the code, the hacker could take the funds he took, like Joe took his laptop.  The terms of the DAO were written clearly to anybody: it was the code (and NOT, explicitly NOT, the explanations given on the DAO site).

But almost with certainty in any jurisdiction, where the DAO website explanations would have been the paper contract, what the hacker did was theft, under state and even moral law.

Now, is Vitalik a thief depends on under which law system we look at it, but things don't look good.  The reasons are:
- everywhere, the DAO guys and Vitalik engaged in writing (on their website) that "the code was the law".  If afterwards, they did something so that the code isn't the law any more, they are breaking their own contract.
- you can argue that under state law, the hacker was a thief.  But then, under state law, you are not supposed to go and "steal back".  ONLY A JUDGE can decide whether a thief was a thief, and whether someone needs to take some action to break his own contract terms to take back what belonged to someone else.  YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO APPLY HUMAN JUSTICE YOURSELF.  You must go to court.
- finally, I think that Vitalik is probably a stake holder in the DAO.  As such, his actions (taking back the funds of the hacker) are FOR PERSONAL GAIN.

These three things make that Vitalik is not in his right shoes according to human law either, and indeed, he stole back the hacker funds by breaking his own engagement/contract ("that the code is the law, that code is unstoppable, that the past is immutable...") for his own gain.

In as much as "taking back the funds" would have been the normal thing to do under human law, it would also have to have been ordered by a judge.  Otherwise, it is theft.

Theft != truth.

Would it be theft if Vitalik Buterin put an open brief case of cash on a dark street corner and someone who found it decided to keep it?

Visibly, you didn't understand the concept of smart contract and "code is law", and now you don't understand the concept of "free open source code".

All ETH developers are automatically also, whether they want or not, ETC developers, given that it is essentially identical open source code.

Irony 101

So there is a possibility that he will not touch the stolen ETC. But can we ever trust that person?

There are two versions of the Ethereum competing with each other, one of them might die within a month.

Correct and the thief is Vitalik.

The DAO beneficiary followed the rules of the contract exactly. He did not break any rules.

You thieves want to break the rules because you decided AFTER THE FACT that you didn't like the rules you had agreed to.

I don't know how different this is on ethereum.  But you can't, as far as I know, "create a new address ON A CHAIN".  You just sign a transaction to a new address, and if that transaction is valid on a chain, it will get captured and included on the chain.

Now, if you do a transaction of pre-forked ETH that is valid on both chains, to a "new address", then you will get as well your new ETH as your ETC on that new address, and your old address is not an unspend output any more.  You need to do something that is NOT a valid transaction on the other chain.  With ETH, you can use a contract. But without a contract, you can also obtain that if you possess some newly mined coin on one or the other chain, even in an infinitely small amount.

But note that if you have ETH in an address on the ETH chain, and ETC in the SAME address on the ETC chain, even after the fork, a signature of the ETH on the first chain will, I believe, also be a valid signature on the ETC chain, even if these are "post fork" transactions.

Thief as in how the code is the law ?  How can he be a thief if he acted according to the law ?
Aren't the thieves rather those that have undone things that were acted by the code and hence the law, using means (hard forks) that were claimed not to be used in the "unstoppable code" selling argument ?

If you obtain things by acting according to the law (the code), and then people change the rules contrary to their engagement to take those things back, aren't THEY the thieves ?

ETH has stolen the coins from his rightful owner by stopping and undoing unstoppable code.  If that doesn't affect market price, then we know what ETH users support.