My thoughts
First of all, I want to say that I am sad because of the situation that BTER is passing through at the moment. I can't imagine how difficult it is to lose that ammount of money. I hope things get resolved in their favor.
Whether the fork is or is not a good idea, I ask the community: Are we going to do this everytime exchange/person/entity 'X' loses a significant amount of nxt for some reason (e.g. got robbed, etc)? Or are we going to do this just to help BTER? I agree that BTER has helped the community a lot with stolen funds and I recognize the value of this kind of effort, but we must also recognize that this kind of decision has a big impact on the nxt ecosystem. The situation in which BTER is can happen to someone else in the future, and I think it will be likely that that someone else will consider "asking the devs/community for a nxt fork" an option.
I am not saying that we should *always* handle this kind of situation the same way, but I encourage that we must think forward (in the future) before taking a decision as a community. I think that forking to help BTER and not doing it to help 'X' would have some kind of negative effect on the community, which is why I think that we as a community should be consistent with the way we handle this kind of situation.
By saying what I said above, I am not expressing myself against or in favor of this decision. I am in favor of *consistency*, because (again,) I think that not being consistent will have some kind of negative effect on the ecosystem. I could be wrong though.
There are other ways we can help BTER as a community, for example, we can collect funds to help them. I agree that it will probably not help them recover everything, but at least we are doing something to help. Or we can also aim to catch the bad guy.
Either way, I will kindly accept the decision that the community takes.
My apologies for my bad English. It is not my first language.
My 2 cents.
Best regards,
- mess