Agree 100%. Mutability itself isn't a problem--our financial system does fine with it. But the ad hoc way rules were created ex post facto by parties with unchecked conflicts of interest is, in my view, a permanent black mark on the project.
Ethereum isn't technically any more malleable than Bitcoin. You might say it's more socially malleable, but governments can't force the community to make any particular decision, any more than they can with Bitcoin.
Ethereum's supply is currently inflating at 13% annually. Bitcoin was at 9% just before last summer's halving, and when it had a $1 billion market cap it was inflating at 33%. If Ethereum succeeds with proof of stake its inflation will drop below 2%, less than Bitcoin has now.
Bitcoin's hashrate is much higher, but that's misleading since Ethereum has a completely different hashing algorithm, running on different hardware. If you compare how much each chain pays for security, the difference is roughly equal to the difference in their market caps.
A turing complete virtual machine is infinitely complicated--it can run anything. The implementation is "trivial" compared to the infinite surface area. The number of spec-pages is not a useful metric.
Social malleability is just as bad as technical malleability.
These are features that run intentionally counter to modern economics.
It is deflationary because strong currencies displace weak ones: Any individual person will want to hold value in a currency that's deflationary; they get greater value from it the longer they hold it. Is that good for the 'economy'? It's a matter of study. But it's the only thing out there that's deflationary (even gold is currently 2%/yr inflation by newly-mined metal). The fact that Etherium chose not to have this is a nod to the economic theories against deflationary currencies. It will help them with economists and politicians, but it works against them in adoption by individuals.
And it works for everyone the exact same way regardless of circumstances. It makes no social judgements. It has no bias. It runs by the rules. Good people can use it for good things. Bad people can use it for bad things. Rich people. Poor people. Oppressed people. Free people. The fact that Etherium broke their own rules makes them flexible in adversity, but it also makes them untruthworthy. Sure a network could always vote to change the rules, but having a culture of doing so means eventually someone with real power (guns and politicians) will make you change it their way.
While both those might help 'mainstream' adoption, mainstream already has money and electronic transfer systems. It'll be easier for them to fix the 3-day hold period with some new laws about 'you must trust X' than to literally move people off the dollar.
Bitcoin is a direct and overt competitor with the world order of money. Etherium is in a tough middle ground; not quite getting the best of either.
Ability for a community to set and agree to new rules is healthy for a blockchain and it makes it more likely that Ethereum can evolve and successfully hardfork to POS mining in the future.
Anyone who claims otherwise is confused or trying to sell you something.
In practice, where some percentage of coins inevitably goes lost every year, this still reduces to a deflationary schedule.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin with its hard limit on coin supply, will likely experience some miner incentive perversions when rewards become dominated by fees rather than coinbase.
If you are into this stuff, there is some interesting research on this: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2016/10/21/bitcoin-is-unstable...
What features of JavaScript prevent you from writing buggy code?
If bitcoin disqualifies itself through certain failings, second tier contenders hold value through their optionality as an alternative.
Rebuttal: a) This isn't a technological feature/fault of Ethereum. What you really mean to say is that 1) Ethereum foundation broke trust by supporting a fork 2) Most Ethereum users chose to go with the fork.
Technically you can be with ETC (the unforked version of ETH).
b) Bitcoin can be forked too, there is nothing technological safeguard in there in it for it to be not forked, because it's literally impossible to build a technology which can't be forked(unless enforced by the govt).
c) The DAO fork was made possible by a bunch of factors: 1. The money the hacker stole was locked in a contract where he couldn't touch it for 30 days. This bought Ethereum foundation time to do something about it. If Polo gets hacked tomorrow, there is nothing Ethereum foundation can do anything about. 2. ETH is based on accounts model, rather than bitcoin's UTXO model. This means Bitcoin can't go with a fork even if they wanted to even if somehow DAO was implemented in an n-lock transaction for 30 days.
d) Ethereum gets crap for breaking "trust" when as a bitcoin holder I would have totally supported a fork to prevent MtGox or Bitfinix's funds being recovered from the thieves.
The fundamental question which everybody who is pondering over this argument on Ethereum needs to answer is this, "If you're using technology X, and a certain malicious entity/bug has affected a significant majority of the other users of technology X,then would you be willing to make attempts to thwart the actions of the malicious users."
Ethereum people showed that they would prefer such an action. Bitcoiners who don't have any stake in this, love to criticize Ethereumers for this.
By that definition of a 'bug', all bugs work perfectly as designed. I mean what is your definition of a bug then?
The DAO's code allowed a person to ask for money to be taken out before the balance was fully updated, this resulted in the attacker taking money out over and over and over.
This clearly was not the 'intent' of the creators or any of it's investors.
All code has bugs, but you dont go asking Satoshi to give your bitcoins back you sent them to the wrong address. "Oops that was not the intent".
-More complex codebase, which makes assessing vulnerabilities more difficult, and security more difficult.
-Ethereum broke trust and "code is law" when self-interested parties were able to rewrite history. Transaction malleability is a terrible property for a "store of value." It leaves the currency open to government interference, manipulation, etc.
-Ethereum has an inflationary schedule. Given a choice between holding an inflating or deflating asset, it seems straightforward which to choose.
-The utility of a given currency is dependent on the number of holders (like Metcalf's law)
-The hashrate and mining power securing bitcoin's network is far greater.