I guess everyone has forgotten about block 74638, when somebody following the consensus rules created 184 billion BTC. A hard fork was done in order to undo those transactions.
Everyone including you, it seems. It was a soft fork (which didn't specifically target any particular transaction, it just fixed the overflow bug).
You are correct. It wasn't a
hard fork, but that is not really the point.
The claim is that Bitcoin and Ethereum are different because Bitcoin transactions would never be undone in order to fix something that people feel is an exploit. Yet, it has been done.
A 51% attack against Bitcoin was successfully executed with a client that enforced new consensus rules in order to undo transactions that were valid under the current consensus rules.
You feel that there was a "bug" in the consensus rules that needed to be fixed, just as people now feel that there is a bug in the DAO contract that needs to be fixed. It all looks the same to me.
Of course it's the same. Anyone who denies it is simply a ETH fudder.
If there would have been a fundamental bug in ethereum, I would agree that it should have been corrected, because ethereum runs on INTEND (of the white paper), not on "code is law".
Bitcoin was supposed to run ON INTEND (the Satoshi white paper), and the bitcoin core software was supposed to IMPLEMENT that INTEND. As such, the concept of "bug" is perfectly possible in bitcoin core. Bitcoin core was not "the code is the law", but "the implementation of intend is the law".
However, ethereum does something totally different. Ethereum is, like bitcoin, based upon a white paper, and the ethereum geth is supposed to implement that INTEND. So if there had been, like with early bitcoin, an ERROR, a BUG (deviation of implementation from intend), then a soft or hard fork was due in order to bring the block chain, which had been ERRONEOUSLY recognized as correct (as to intend) by buggy software, back in agreement with the monetary intend.
But that is not what happened, ethereum ran PERFECTLY AS INTENDED IN ITS WHITE PAPER.
Ethereum, however, had as main value proposition "smart contracts", where these have the extremely funny property of NOT HAVING INTEND but "code = law". This is the essential value proposition of ethereum.
Now, the DAO having a funny implementation that doesn't correspond to "intend" is hence similar to running bitcoin byte code that doesn't do as you intended. It is the complex version of having "signed a transaction" (= bitcoin byte code) in which you made a mistake and that was exploited by someone.
So there is a HUGE difference between fixing bitcoin, and fixing the DAO. Fixing bitcoin was bringing the bitcoin core in agreement with the bitcoin intend (white paper). Fixing the DAO was denying the fundamental (even though silly) value proposition of ethereum, namely "code is law", by making the ethereum code DEVIATE from white paper intend.
Bitcoin never forked over any piece of byte code not running as intended by those writing the byte code. And bitcoin even doesn't have as fundamental value proposition "bytecode is law", which was the ethereum value proposition in the first place !
