The threat of hard forks undermines not only confidence in the governance of the cryptocurrency, but also of any application (in the 'make-use-of' sense) of the

The threat of hard forks undermines not only confidence in the governance of the cryptocurrency, but also of any application (in the 'make-use-of' sense) of the blockchain. Specifically, Ethereum was designed with the explicit purpose of running distributed applications that commit their applicaton state into the blockchain. If this state can be subject to a rollback, in the form of forking from a block in the past -- community consensus notwithstanding -- then then you can never rely on the blockchain as storage. Now, of course, cryptocurrencies only have value if participants believe in them; and these supposed 'smart contracts' of 'state-in-the-blockchain' work the same way. Since we lack the technological means to prevent forks, we need human stewardship to avoid them, and that's clearly not what Ethereum has done.