By
Bhushan Akolkar
May 10th, 2024
On May 29th, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is doing a hard fork to remove the difficulty bomb from the Ethereum Classic Mainnet at block 5,900,000 for saving its profits.
Ethereum Classic (ETC), the blockchain platform that maintained the original spirit of the Ethereum (ETH) network, is undergoing a drastic change in its system. Ethereum Classic is set to fork tomorrow. The aim is to make sure that their mining remains profitable, not to create a new cryptocurrency.
https://twitter.com/eth_classic/status/1000114884648947712
Ethereum Classic is a continuation of the original Ethereum blockchain – the classic version preserving untampered history; free from external interference and subjective tampering of transactions. It is a smarter blockchain, a network, a community, and a cryptocurrency that takes digital assets further. In addition to allowing people to send value to each other, ETC allows for complex contracts that operate autonomously and cannot be modified or censored.
According to CoinMarketCap, ETC current price makes up $14,87.
On May 29th, Ethereum Classic team is doing a hard fork to remove the difficulty bomb from the Ethereum Classic Mainnet at block 5,900,000. The change, in which all users of the original ethereum blockchain will need to update their software, is aimed at disabling a feature designed to increase the difficulty of mining the protocol’s rewards ahead of a shift to a new consensus algorithm.
Unlike Ethereum, the ETC team has no plans to migrate to PoS and that is why the Difficulty Bomb needs be removed to avoid collapse of the network.
https://twitter.com/eth_classic/status/1000982753796554752
If the Bomb is not removed, the mining will become unprofitable by September 2018. Mining Difficulty grows exponentially every 100,000 blocks by factor of 2. It was paused by ECIP-1010 from block 3,000,000 to block 5,000,000.
Ethereum adherents argue that proof-of-stake systems are more energy efficient than their proof-of-work counterparts. However, Anthony Lusardi, developer and director of ETC Cooperative, a community development and marketing body for the protocol, disagrees. He sought to frame the impending removal of the code as another way the ethereum classic project is attempting to differentiate since the 2017 split.
“Proof-of-work seems to be the most decentralized approach currently to achieving consensus from what the majority of the community feels,” Lusardi said. He added: “There’s a lot of new algorithms being proposed like proof-of-stake, delegated proof-of-stake and byzantine fault tolerance, and within our community we’re not convinced that these newer versions of consensus are any more decentralized and we’re somewhat afraid that they may be more centralized than say proof-of-work.”
According to Lusardi, proof-of-work systems better resist centralization because mining requires continuous infrastructural investment in hardware. Conversely, once a participant achieves an “economic majority” in a proof-of-stake system, “there doesn’t seem to be much to ever stop them from having it.”
“The entire premise is that you would put normal money into the system to buy a stake in it, and banks and large institutions have unfair amounts of capital compared to normal participants,” Ethereum classic developer Cody Burns said.
Recently, Ethereum Classic was taken as an example for the research conducted by Husam Abboud, a researcher of FECAP University. He used Ethereum Classic to demonstrate the hackability of cryptocurrency networks using Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithms. Husam Abboud calculated that it could take just $55 mln to hack a major cryptocurrency network for $1bln profit.
“We can safely estimate The Cost of a 51% attack on Ethereum Classic today to be between 55 to 85 million [USD] (averaged $70 million),” Abboud reported. His methods employed a cost calculation model for 51% attacks known as Rindex v2.0, which removes aspects such as purchasing new equipment in favor of “leasing” hashpower from other PoW coins, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH).
The goal of the research was “to raise the awareness of this attack vector so that we can take appropriate measures to increase our networks’ robustness before it gets exploited,” according to Abboud. The researcher also provided various solutions to avert the problems including upgrading to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).