For those not in the loop but interested, here's a copy of our Pool Newsletter:
Dear fellow Miners,
As for a few says now, several EMC2 wallets are out there in the wild with different versions and all claiming to be compatible with the upcoming "hard fork". We (PM-Tech) have reviewed the changes and what we found left us more or less speechless. I would like to summarise and share the most astonishing findings with you:
- The codebase used is an "intermediate dirty" version (0.13.3) which was used to get all the soft forks in and finally validated as well. This required a lot of additional database access and there for throttling performance. Immediately after all forks have been active, it was supposed to be replaced by a faster, more stable version. It was ready from our side but never got officially released.
- The changes "new" wallet code are simple - one single number. Looking at this number, while being part of the overall consensus, change of the number DOES NOT promote the network consensus. In other words, we are not looking at a "hard fork" as per definition. Old nodes are fully accepting and validating blocks mined by "new" nodes, in the other direction only blocks claiming their wormhole reward are being rejected by the update. As per protocol this means, a fork occurs as soon as the first wormhole block is mined after the block height inside this (downgrade-) update. Now the overall consensus rules are in place saying the chain containing more overall chain work is going to survive.
- Let's assume they manage it to get this side chain rolling. Both chains are still using the same mempool. In practical words, transactions can be mined on either chain, the mining node clears the mempool and the coins appear to be lost. Recovery is possible but annoying.
- Both chains are running the same transaction protocol. For the split that means, every coin created before the fork can be incorporated into a replay transaction. A detailed explanation how this works would be a little bit too much for here.
There are still thousands of "old" nodes out there, plenty of them even on the first released wallet code. So are certain attackers which are certainly not giving up on their tricks so our conclusion is to NOT downgrade to any of those (jump) fork codes but remain on latest while running a little bit of background hash power in order to keep the classic chain alive.
So what's important for the near future?
- There are 2 wormholes scheduled, one at the end of November, one beginning of December
- We have seen code versions out there where some contain the fork block at he Nov wormhole, majority on Dec wormhole (around 8th - 10th)
- As for the last wormhole already, we are not going to take measures against the usual attempt of a 51% attack, simply because the measures are costly (around 4 BTC id you want to be safe) and risky
- We are expecting exchanges to close down EMC2 wallets already before the Nov wormhole, but since they are close together they might not re-open before all the "fork" dust has settled
- As a miner, decide carefully if and which chain you decide to mine. Usually mining pools aren't prepared for a mess like the one to expect, so payout algorithms can fail as they are just looking a certain number of blocks back (usually 120)
Please note that our pools will remain up on the classic chain all the way through but we can not take any responsibility for value lost due to these events and their bugs and failures.
So far Happy Mining,
Michael