He's invested in a specific contract someone else created on the network. Not specifically invested in the currency itself.

The ethereum website starts off with this line:

> Ethereum is a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference

The developers of Ethereum now want to censor transactions from a certain address and interfere with a certain contract because it ran exactly as programmed (including bugs).

That is why it's a controversial fork. If the only reason they're going against the stated principles of the network because the developers are heavily invested themselves... it makes it more controversial. If they're not invested in the next big contract to fail, will that one get bailed out as well?

First, realize that this logic applies to any conflict of interest.

For example: of course the judge would rule in favor of the company he's invested in. He wouldn't invest in a company if he didn't think it was a company with good, reasonable management!

They've proposed a hard or soft fork of the software. Them owning these tokens may bias them to serve their own interests above those of the Ethereum project as a whole. Even if they remain completely unbiased, there is at least the appearance of conflict of interest which may harm the project.

I don't see any problem as long as this was disclosed ahead of time.

I'm a little unclear on this whole thing, but I believe that Ethereum and The DAO are distinct things. Ethereum is a virtual currency, and The DAO is something built on top of that virtual currency.

So the situation here is not so much like founder investing in his own creation, but rather like a founder investing in a user of his creation. Then the user screws up, and some want the founder to make a change in his creation to help that user...but that change might hurt other users who did not screw up.

Thats a failure of an analogy.

It would be a better analogy if it was a developer of TCP/IP and something bad happened to their website so to fix it they fucked with TCPIP to fix an application level issue.