1. The fact that there is a hard fork coming has been known for months if not years.
2. Developers have notified the community well in advance and content of the hardfork has been discussed with all key players (ex: reward and difficulty bomb).
3. The development decisions are public as is the process - try searching for live streams of developer meetings where Vitalik and others discuss direction in very democratic fashion. I'm not even interested in those and I came across - funny that you're not aware of the existence.
There is a stark contrast between Eth and BTC where constant bickering is the norm.
https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs
https://github.com/ethereum/pm/tree/master/All%20Core%20Devs...
These changes should be no surprise to anyone who's made any effort at all to follow Ethereum development.
I had wanted to jump on the ETH hype train and almost bought a bunch but these planned forks make the platform seem very “centralized.”
As with other blockchains, forks don't happen unless users go along with them.
Just because you chose to not read the announcements doesn't mean it wasn't announced.
I'm certain that I'm not the only user who is surprised that the hard fork is only 4 days away.
If, say, you use a hardware wallet and MyEtherWallet to issue your transactions, then you don't have any updates to make.
4 days! This announcement was made 4 days before the fork is introduced??? Everyone in the whole ecosystem has 4 days to upgrade it be exposed to a vulnerability. If you are running special code or your own client, you have to adjust it for a new block reward, a new script primitive, a difficulty algorithm, and stuff they are literally calling mathemagic.
I don't see how this is responsible development.