I've been involved with ethereum long before the presale and never once has there been any expectation of a soft cap. Nobody removed a cap. If you don't like an uncapped coin, use Bitcoin and help them figure out how their coin is going to maintain security after the mining rewards start to dwindle.
Nothing wrong with uncapped supply. It's still disinflationary. In fact, it ends up with zero inflation when tail emission matches inevitable coin loss.
There is however something wrong with defaulting on promises made at launch.
Yes this is precisely the issue. I don't mind various types of currency, but when you buy 50 of the ~100M ethereum you expect it to remain somewhat proportional in value.
That didn't happen, mere years after its launch they blew through the cap and are already 15% over.
Remember that all cryptocurrencies run under a consensus agreed between all its participants. This consensus is always subject to change: the Bitcoin network could decide to allow for 10 million more BTC at any moment. They just choose not to do it.
Ethereum builtin limits work as an incentive to force timely decisions. The initial 100M limit, and the difficulty bombs (which cause "ice ages") ensured that the initial versions of Ethereum wouldn't be able to run forever: mining rewards would stop, or mining would be too difficult to be profitable. This impending doom ensures the protocol needs to be updated, and once that conversation regarding the new consensus is active, it is easier to bring in new changes and improvements too.
One final point: whoever bought ETH at any point up to mid 2017 has seen massive returns. It could be argued that this is precisely because of the changes Ethereum has undergone over time, and that keeping close to the initial design would have been worse.
I stopped supporting Ethereum when they abandoned code is law, and arbitrarily rewrote the rules to protect against the DAO hack.
It's fine to protect against theft, but it's not fine when it's only enforced arbitrarily and only when the core developers themselves are affected.
This is the whole premise behind the irreversibility of cryptocurrencies, that the only fair thing is to never do it, and when you abandon that why not go all the way to a centralized database?
Ethereum is therefore not fit to be a currency, and should be treated as a world computer experiment.
They didn't abandon "code is law." They legislated code to deal with a specific problem that they had a state interest to solve.
Blockchains do introduce code as law, but if the code can change then they also introduce legislatures (the miners). Those legislatures have voting power equivalent to their % of mining control. The point isn't to make transactions irreversible; the point is to create a system of distributed control in which a decision to revert a transaction requires consensus among the miner/legislators.
Even in the bug fix there wasn't any unit testing involved. I'm using multisig to store all my Bitcoins, so it scared me extremely. With Bitcoin I read through the multisig code (stack machine) before putting money onto the blockchain. With Ethereum the code changes so fast, that with all the hard forks I wouldn't be able to verify the code. ,,Don't trust, verify'' doesn't work there.
That was a bug in the smart contract, not ethereum.
Ethereum never had base layer bugs that allowed for infinite inflation, bitcoin had - last time in 2018.
,,That was a bug in the smart contract, not ethereum''
Great, then I'm just not planning to use smart contracts in Ethereum, I'll be fine without them.
You're right about the Bitcoin bug, but Ethereum had a lot of its own bugs (with downtimes as well). I'm not trying to argue with you, because I'm sure you know about them, just fail to accept.
Ethereum used to have a soft cap of 100M coins. They removed the cap.
Ethereum is no Bitcoin. It's more akin to dogecoin/fiat with its infinite money.
Hope POS works so Bitcoin can adopt it.