You can call my views extreme, but I genuinely believe that over the long term “protecting people from shooting themselves in the foot” will lead to institutionalised theft, especially considering there’s no formalised boundary. EIP-999 might not be considered theft, but each time we accept one of these proposals to essentially undo a transaction, we’re taking another step towards a centralised government that gets to choose which transactions are valid and which are not. Each recovery will set another a precedent just like the DAO fork did (if the DAO fork never happened, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation). Long term, if we accept state changes like this Ethereum will slowly evolve towards a corruptible, tyrannical system over the decades to come. These views were expressed in the DAO fork debate in 2016 and they are still valid today.
Institutionalised theft exists because a small minority of people hold more power than the rest. Many people are attracted to cryptocurrency because of the absolute property rights, i.e. nobody can interfere with your transactions. The fundamental awesome-ness of Ethereum is that code executes exactly as written and there shouldn’t be exceptions to that for people who are exceptionally negligent. This EIP breaks the core functionality of Ethereum.
As harsh as it may sound, un-freezing ether is a form of theft. When balances become frozen, the value attached to those burnt ether are effectively distributed to the whole economy. In the same fashion as when you transfer ether to 0x0000, or when you set fire to $1 trillion. Redistributing value from the current ether holders is a form of inflationary theft in the same sense that quantitative easing and corporate bailouts are hidden thefts.
For those that want a quasi-centralised system where transactions can be undone, they should opt-in to a solution on the Ethereum application layer; these decisions shouldn’t be made at the protocol level. It’s clear from the volume of debate in this EIP-867 and EIP-999, the split sentiment on reddit and the results of the EIP-999 coinvote that many people are not interested in a system like this.
You might have a personal fence, but the greater community doesn’t. I think we need to determine where that fence is now and commit to holding that promise for the future of Ethereum. And I think that if and when we come to a consensus on that, it should only be applied to future state changes (i.e. EIP-999 should fail no matter what).
Out of curiosity, where is your fence?