Topic: ETH hardfork incoming. (Read 18991 times)

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/11/18/hard-fork-no-4-spurious-dragon/

Hard Fork No. 4: Spurious Dragon

Posted by Hudson Jameson on November 18th, 2016.
The Ethereum network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 2,675,000, which will likely occur between 15:00 and 16:00 UTC on Tuesday, November 22, 2016. A countdown timer can be seen at https://fork.codetract.io/. The Morden test network will be undergoing a hard fork at block number 1,885,000.

As a user, what do I need to do?

Download the latest version of your Ethereum client:

Latest version of Ethereum Wallet/Mist (v0.8.7)
Latest geth client (v1.5.2)
Latest Parity client (v1.4.4)
Latest ruby-ethereum client (v0.11.0)
What happens if I do not update my client?

If you are using an Ethereum client that is not updated for the upcoming hard fork, your client will sync to the pre-fork blockchain once the fork occurs. You will be stuck on an incompatible chain following the old rules and you will be unable to send ether or operate on the post-fork Ethereum network.

Importantly, if your client is not updated, it also means that any transactions you make will still be susceptible to replay attacks.

What if I am using a web or mobile Ethereum wallet like MyEtherWallet or Jaxx?

Ethereum websites and mobile applications that allow you to store ether and/or make transactions are running their own Ethereum client infrastructure to facilitate their services. Generally, you do not need to do anything if you use a third party web based or mobile Ethereum wallet. However, you should still check with your web or mobile Ethereum wallet provider to see what actions they are taking to update for the hard fork and if they are asking their users to take other steps.

In particular, you should ensure that transactions are generated with the new replay-protected EIP 155 scheme.

What do I do if my Ethereum client is having trouble syncing to the blockchain?

Make sure you have downloaded the latest version of your Ethereum client.

If you are using Geth or Mist, refer to this Ethereum StackExchange thread.
If you are using Parity, refer to this section of the Parity wiki.
Why are we proposing to hard fork the network?

“Spurious Dragon” is the second hard fork of the two-round hard fork response to the DoS attacks on the Ethereum network in September and October. The previous hard fork (a.k.a “Tangerine Whistle”) addressed immediate network health issues due to the attacks. The upcoming hard fork addresses important but less pressing matters such as further tuning opcode pricing to prevent future attacks on the network, enabling “debloat” of the blockchain state, and adding replay attack protection.

What changes are a part of this hard fork?

The following Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) describe the protocol changes implemented in this hard fork.

EIP 155: Replay attack protection – prevents transactions from one Ethereum chain from being rebroadcasted on an alternative chain. For example: If you send 150 test ether to someone from the Morden testnet, that same transaction cannot be replayed on the main Ethereum chain. Important note: EIP 155 is backwards compatible, so transactions generated with the “pre-Spurious-Dragon” format will still be accepted. However, to ensure you are protected against replay attacks, you will still need to use a wallet solution that implements EIP 155.
Be aware that this backwards compatibility also means that transactions created from alternative Ethereum based blockchains that have not implemented EIP 155 (such as Ethereum Classic) can still be replayed on the main Ethereum chain.
EIP 160: EXP cost increase – adjusts the price of `EXP` opcode so it balances the price of `EXP` with the computational complexity of the operation, essentially making it more difficult to slow down the network via computationally expensive contract operations.
EIP 161: State trie clearing – makes it possible to remove a large number of empty accounts that were put in the state at very low cost as a result of earlier DoS attacks. With this EIP, ’empty’ accounts are removed from the state whenever ‘touched’ by another transaction. Removal of the empty accounts greatly reduces blockchain state size, which will provide client optimizations such as faster sync times. The actual removal process will begin after the fork by systematically performing `CALL` to the empty accounts that were created by the attacks.
EIP 170: Contract code size limit – changes the maximum code size that a contract on the blockchain can have. This update prevents an attack scenario where large pieces of account code can be accessed repeatedly at a fixed gas cost. The maximum size has been set to 24576 bytes, which is larger than any currently deployed contract.

https://github.com/ethereum/pm/issues/1

All Core Devs Meeting 8 Agenda

Meeting Date/Time: 10/28/2016 1:00PM UTC

Meeting Duration 1.5 hours

Agenda

Please provide comments for proposed agenda topics or corrections to agenda topics.

1. Upcoming HF to clear out state + potentially other changes.

Clearing out state
EIP 158 by (@vbuterin)
EIP 161 by (@gavofyork)
EXP Cost Increase
EIP 160 by (@vbuterin)
Replay attack protection
Do we want it in the upcoming HF, Metropolis, or not at all?
EIP 134 by @aakilfernandes
EIP 155 by @vbuterin
"high order bits nonce scheme" coded here by @obscuren
Time/Date of HF.
2. EIP/ERC GitHub Organization

Improvement Discussion
EIP 148 by @axic

The hard fork has finished.

https://www.bokconsulting.com.au/blog/ethereum-gas-reprice-hard-fork-was-a-success/

Summary

The Gas Reprice hard fork successfully stopped all the previous attacks since the start of Devcon2.

Update 14:26 Oct 19 2016 – The attacker is now conducting a new set of smaller impact attacks using another an underpriced EXP opcode and a BALANCE operation that need some cache improvements – see the updated section at the bottom of this page to see the impact on the block processing. The next planned hard fork will address these new attack vectors – see ATTENTION MINERS: Recommending miners lower the gas limit target to 2 million. What a dynamic and responsive Ethereum ecosystem this is!


The Attacks

The Ethereum blockchain has been undergoing a attack since the start of the Devcon2 conference a few weeks ago (beginning Sep 19 2016).

The first attack started on block 2,283,416 at 01:04:56 Sep 19 Shanghai time and targeted the go-ethereum geth clients, causing a memory error and shutting down these nodes across the network. Luckily the Ethereum network has separately implemented node clients written in Rust (Parity) and Java (EthereumJ) – these clients did not suffer from the same memory bug and kept the network up and running. The Ethereum developers in Shanghai had to get up early before the start of the conference and shortly after released a version of geth with the memory bug fixed. This ended up delaying the start of the conference by half an hour.

My 125 Mhs solo miner stopped working for the week while I was in Shanghai as I had not set up a VPN connection to my node due to security reasons.

Soon after the first attack, the attacker then regularly sent spam transactions (see here and here) to slow down the Ethereum network. Using cheaply priced opcodes (Ethereum Virtual Machine instruction codes), the attacker sent transactions that caused heavy computational and disk input/output loads on the Ethereum nodes. This was later followed by spam transactions that created many empty accounts on the blockchain, causing a “state-bloat” on the blockchain.

Worst affected users seem to be those trying to run a full sync of the Ethereum blockchain on machines with limited memory and running on a hard disk drive (HDD) instead of a solid state drive (SSD). See Is something wrong with the network right now?, sync isn’t working for 0.8.5 been trying for days and 5th time downloading Blockchain 15 days for example.

Non-spam transactions were failing as quite a number of mining pools decided not to process transactions as these would slow down their mining node operations, and the non-spam transactions were getting lost in the ether.


The Hard Forks

The Ethereum Foundation announced two hard forks to stop the spam transaction attacks. As listed in the previous link, you have to install the latest Ethereum node clients containing the hard fork code – geth 1.4.18, Parity 1.3.8, EthereumJ 1.3.6 and Ethereum Wallet 0.8.6 (remember never to trust links to the node clients from unofficial sites). If you have run an earlier version of the node client after the first Gas Repricing hard fork (see below), you will have to re-sync your blockchain data from scratch.


The First Hard Fork – Gas Repricing

The first EIP 150 Long-term gas cost changes for IO-heavy operations to mitigate transaction spam attacks hard fork successfully activated at block 2,463,000 at Oct-18-2016 01:19:31 PM +UTC to reprice the gas for some of the opcodes. This raises the cost for the attacker to send their spam transactions.


The Attacks Have Stopped

The attackers transactions started failing (source) immediately after the hard fork. This account spend 9 – 3.899521491 = 5.100478509 ethers (~ USD 64.10) to send 1,183 spam transactions to the network.

There is one more Ethereum hard fork.

https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/10/13/announcement-imminent-hard-fork-eip150-gas-cost-changes/

Announcement of imminent hard fork for EIP150 gas cost changes

Posted by Martin Swende on October 13th, 2016.
During the last couple of weeks, the Ethereum network has been the target of a sustained attack. The attacker(s) have been very crafty in locating vulnerabilities in the client implementations as well as the protocol specification.

While the recent patches have led to an overall increased resiliency in the client implementations, the attacks have also demonstrated that a lower-level change to the EVM pricing model is needed.

For many users, the most visible consequence is probably that they are having difficulties getting transactions included in blocks, and full nodes are facing memory limitations in managing the bloated state.

This is our strategy to address these issues:

As a temporary measure to minimize the effects of the most recent attack, we recommend all miners to lower the gaslimit to 500K gas.
A hard-fork based on EIP 150 version 1c will be put into effect at block 2457000 [see below]. This will reprice certain operations to correspond better to the underlying computational complexity.
A second hard-fork will follow shortly after, aimed at reverting the current “state-bloat” introduced by the attacks. This second fork will serve to remove accounts which are empty; lacking code, balance, storage and nonce == 0.
We have implemented the changes required in the clients and are currently extending and adding tests in an effort to prevent the introduction of consensus-breaking vulnerabilities.

And as a reminder, the Ethereum Bug Bounty is open and includes the new hardfork-implementations.

EDIT: Fork block has been moved to 2463000 in order to accommodate even more testing.

Some interesting read about the conference.
https://medium.com/@alwaysbcoding/the-insanity-and-brilliance-at-ethereums-developer-conference-baa89880d1ce#.al6nu0qu1

The Insanity and Brilliance at Ethereum’s Developer Conference
It’s 4am and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Shanghai, China. The second ever Ethereum developers conference is set to kick off in a few hours. The time-zone shift woke me up early, and I’m sitting in my bed playing with my newly modded phone. The Chinese government censors most large American mobile apps behind something colloquially referred to as “The Great Firewall” so you need to use all of these shoddily made, Chinese government approved, replacement apps instead. The preferred app for messaging is an app called WeChat, a bizarre Slack / Venmo / Tinder hybrid that 800 million people use to communicate every day. We have a group chatroom for the conference going, which I’m scrolling through when my phone buzzes. Someone posted a new message into the chatroom. “The Ethereum network is under attack”.
Ethereum is this insane thing going on in the tech world right now. It’s a new cryptocurrency that is picking up the pieces of the fractured Bitcoin ecosystem and trying to succeed in accomplishing what Bitcoin has failed to do, deliver the first batch of successful consumer applications built on top of blockchain technology. You can think of Bitcoin a bit like a shared google doc spreadsheet that anyone in the world can send data to, one global ledger of accounts and balances. Ethereum builds on this idea by providing a mechanism for users to add custom formulas into the cells. Anyone who has done any kind of Microsoft Excel programming knows how powerful spreadsheets can become with just a few simple formulas. Ethereum is the first working implementation of programmable money, a simple concept that may one day bring the entire global financial system to it’s knees. And it draws brilliant people from all walks of life into its orbit.
The 4AM attack on the network is bizarre in that it’s not really a malicious hack, but more like comical mischief. Ethereum runs as a distributed system. At any given time, there will be thousands of separate computers (also called nodes) running the Ethereum protocol and keeping the network online. The actual software that the computers use to run the Ethereum protocol comes in many different flavors, the most popular one is an application called Geth, written in Google’s Go programming language. 85% of all Ethereum nodes are running Geth at the time. The attack pushes a piece of data onto the blockchain that exploits a bug in the Geth software causing the program to crash. Because every live node syncs the latest version of the blockchain in real-time, just like that 85% of the Ethereum network goes offline. Some developers are able to respond by switching over to the Parity Ethereum client, a new client written in the high-performant Rust Language that is currently gaining market share, but for others switching over to Parity is too risky without having time to run extensive testing. The Ethereum network is essentially frozen until an update can be pushed to Geth.
The main developers of Geth are asleep in Shanghai. They might not even have their laptops with them, as it’s risky to take your work computer into mainland China if it contains any sensitive information. They’re also scheduled to go on stage and give a presentation in a couple hours. When they wake up, do they fix the bug and miss their talk or go onto the stage? Like I said, comical mischief. People slowly start to wake up and news of the attack starts spreading. In a back room somewhere developers start pounding on their laptops. In a matter of hours, the bug is identified, an update is shipped, the nodes download the latest version of the software and go back online. Crisis averted. The net result of the attack? The conference start time gets pushed back half an hour. The Geth developers come out on stage to a raucous applause. Just another day in the cryptocurrency world.
Ethereum has a certain resiliency to it. It reminds me a bit of being in Israel. When you live under the constant threat of attack, you develop a desensitization and rationality around the notion of outside threats, so you respond to them with logic instead of emotion. The term ‘anti-fragile’ (meaning something that becomes stronger every time it is put under attack) has been a buzzword in Silicon Valley lately, but Ethereum has thus far personified it. Nobody is overly phased by the 4am attack. It’s doubtful that such a large portion of the network will run the same client software at the same time in the future. This attack vector won’t work again.
DevCon is the single best tech conference that I’ve ever been to. It’s a firehose of technical information and ambitious product demos blasted at you non-stop over the course of three days. There’s an energy and an optimism that I’ve never felt before, and an underlying belief amongst the community that Ethereum has finally gotten it right and we’re t-minus one year away from cryptocurrency truly exploding into mainstream consciousness.
While other technical communities are bickering about who can censor more conference speakers, Ethereum is moving along with a laser focus on solving real problems, like how to scale the blockchain to thousands of transactions per second, how to make developer tooling more approachable, and how to keep the network running despite the constant barrage of hacks and DDoS attacks being levied against it. At DevCon you’re just as likely to find a web developer, a systems engineer, an academic, or an MBA. A transexual, an avid Trump supporter, a Chinese entrepreneur, a New York City venture capitalist, or a techie in a hoodie who has 5 million dollars worth of Ether. It’s a safe space for eccentric personalities. You still have your typical discussions at the bar about immutable databases and functional programming like you would at any tech conference, but the whole thing has an elevated sense of scope around it, like these discussions you’re having actually matter somehow.
The biggest news from the conference comes in the form of two competing visions for Ethereum’s eventual switch to a proof-of-stake model. A make-or-break release under the code name “Casper”. The proof-of-work model was one of the brilliant inventions of the original Bitcoin protocol. A system that manages to align the incentives of all actors towards keeping the network running honestly and investing in the future of the currency. Ethereum is switching away from this battle-tested methodology to something more ambitious and unproven. Something that, if it works, will consume less electricity and allow for faster transaction processing times.
Vitalik Buterin, the 22-year old brainchild behind Ethereum, presents his “Mauve Paper”, a well-reasoned approach for how to move the Ethereum network to proof-of-stake. Vlad Zamfir, a theoretical mathematician, later unveils his competing vision for proof-of-stake. Vlad speaks at 100 miles per hour. “I feel bad for the Chinese translators” someone says. The entire conference is being live-translated into Chinese, or it least it was until Vlad took the stage. On cue I see a Chinese girl take her headset off, the translators had no chance on this talk. “I need a presentation about this presentation” someone else says. Two competing models, unveiled publicly in front of the community. The better model will win in the end.
I meet a guy from Germany who runs one of the biggest Ethereum mining rigs. He shows me a picture of his setup on his phone. I’m blown away by the scope of it. A massive farm of servers all working 24/7 to solve esoteric math problems to ensure that new transactions get mined into the Ethereum blockchain promptly. “How much electricity does that use?” Someone asks him. “A couple million dollars a month” he answers. But it’s still profitable, very profitable, because the Ether it produces is worth so much. He goes to Vitalik “You know, you better make sure that Casper is well tested before switching over. It needs a lot of testing.” He’s half-joking, but there’s a vague semblance of hostility in there. The longer it takes for the Casper fork to go live, the more money the miners will make. Moving to a proof-of-stake model renders their massive hardware farms irrelevant. Every month that goes by before Casper goes live has a multi-million dollar impact for miners running the network. No pressure or anything.
Alex Van De Sande unveils the next version of the Mist browser. It’s the most impressive product that’s demoed at DevCon. Mist is a next generation web browser that runs on top of the open source Chromium engine powering Google Chrome. It lets you browse the internet just like any web browser does, but it also hooks into your Ethereum wallet, meaning you can trivially pay for any kind of content as you’re browsing. No credit card needed, no bank account needed, no obnoxious sign-up forms. It will unlock an entire new class of digital business models.
Juan Benet unveils Filecoin. A cryptocurrency built on top of Ethereum that will pay users to store files, creating a distributed version of Amazon S3 for the world to use. A BitTorrent protocol on steroids. Juan announces that the team thought long and hard about how to build it, but eventually decided to build on top of Ethereum due to the incredible community emerging around it. The crowd goes wild.
I go to lunch with a couple of millionaires. They call themselves the next generation of “Oil Tycoons”. Crypto ballers who were savvy enough to buy up massive amounts of Ether during it’s initial offering to the public. Ether has increased in price substantially since it’s launch, something like 40x. Traditional investments don’t return 40x the money that you put into it 18 months later, but Ethereum just did. Again, crypto is insane.
And all this is barely even scratching the surface. You see a new UI for the Parity client, academic papers on formal verification of smart contracts, mobile apps that connect to the Ethereum network, and beyond. There’s a black hole of interesting topics to understand in the blockchain space. A friend tells me about the term “chronocracy”. The way you can have a “plutocracy” or a “meritocracy” a “chronocracy” is an ecosystem where your status is defined by how much time you have put into it. There’s so much to know about how the low level protocols work, about how the current financial system works, that the status hierarchy at DevCon is a proxy of who has put in the most time to understand it all.
You can’t talk honestly about the insane world of cryptocurrency without also acknowledging that the whole thing has a bit of a dotcom era vibe to it. I get the impression that companies are throwing a decade of best practices out the window because they used the word “blockchain” in their sales pitch. Over the past ten years Silicon Valley has evolved somewhat of a repeatable model for building successful technical ventures. A couple of smart founders, even if they’re just broke kids living in their offices, build a prototype of an innovative product that solves a simple problem they have. They hack on it until they start making money from it, realize that they’re onto something bigger than they ever imagined, get investors on board that believe in their vision and scale their companies from there.
Blockchain does it backwards, you have companies with 15 people and $10 million in funding that can’t even explain what they’re building. You see companies throwing parties before they’ve even launched their product, or talk about disrupting massive industries before they’ve even proven they can execute on a simple task. Founders who would get laughed out of the room in today’s startup climate are somehow swindling investors out of their money again because blockchain.
One company holds large amounts of Ether and builds open-source tooling for the Ethereum ecosystem. Normally open-source tooling is hard to monetize, but if the open source tools lead to better adoption among developers, and thus more people building on Ethereum, then the price of Ether will go up, and the company will make money. It’s a business model I’ve never seen before, but maybe it’s just crazy enough to work. Welcome to crypto.
I meet someone who is right out of college and a contributor to the core code base of the Solidity compiler. I mentioned that Ethereum is a shared spreadsheet with formulas. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is what runs the code in these “formulas” which are normally referred to as smart contracts. The most popular way to write smart contracts is in a programming language called Solidity, but that Solidity code has to be compiled down to EVM bytecode before it can be executed, that’s where this compiler comes in. “If you asked me a year ago I never thought that I’d be writing compilers today” he tells me. It’s incredible someone could pick it up so quickly, but also a little disquieting. Can a bunch of millennials with little real world experience really hack together something that will eventually displace the U.S. dollar? He works for a company that sells smart contracts to Big 4 consulting firms. They’re one of the only companies in the entire blockchain space that actually makes money.
Even with the flashing red warning signs everywhere you look, it doesn’t diminish the point that people are right to be excited about this. The stewards of many large centralized technology products have begun to hit a plateau, and are failing to push us forward. I don’t want to simply settle for the world they’ve constructed when there are obvious ways to improve upon it. I just have this underlying feeling that something bigger is around the corner. You can see it everywhere if you pay attention.
I’ve been making coding screencasts on youtube recently and just eclipsed the 1,000 views / day threshold where you can start to think about making a bit of money from it. The monetization options youtube presents to content creators are outright pathetic. You can put ads on your videos, but if a user skips it you don’t get paid. If a user has Adblock you don’t get paid. And ads are a terrible way to monetize video content anyway. You can try to charge for the content directly, but youtube reserves the right to alter the amount you are charging at any time. No joke you don’t even have the right to choose how much to charge for the content you’re making on their platform. A much better model would be to have users pay content creators directly, even with tiny transaction values. This isn’t possible with our current financial system where purchases of digital content for less than $3 are not only outside the social zeitgeist but also not feasible for most credit card processors. But with Ethereum, sending small amounts of money directly to people who warrant it is exactly the point. On an Ethereum enabled video platform you could send a penny to the content creator every time you view more than x minutes of content. It’s a fundamentally better model for video content than the one youtube offers.
Twitter put the final nail in it’s coffin when it made the decision to permanently ban Milo Yiannopoulos — a popular conservative personality — from it’s platform without explanation. When social networks that once marketed themselves as a public utility for free speech start banning accounts for wrong-speech, sanitizing their content in an effort to become more “advertiser friendly” it marks the beginning of the end. Whatever replaces Twitter will use blockchain technology to prevent censorship and hopefully create a better public interface to your identity than the one Twitter has proven itself capable of providing.
The Apple App Store has failed us as well. Monetizing mobile apps is brutally hard for developers, and the entire consumer mobile application space has ground to a halt. Instead of needing to raise tons of money, needing to scale to a massive user base, or needing to force obnoxious ads on your users to be viable, it would be a much better model if a user that opens your app x times in a month automatically sends a dollar to the developer who made it. Then developers could optimize for a pleasant experience instead of an adversarial one. There’s nothing forcing us to live under a centralized entity tithing 30% of revenue and setting constricting rules on monetization options other than our own lack of ambition. We can do better than this.
Seed-stage funding for nascent startups is a pool of perverse incentives right now, but cryptocurrencies can provide a better approach. An Ethereum startup, Augur, raised $5 million in a pre-sale of reputation tokens that can be used to generate revenue for users that manually resolve bets on the prediction market that it’s building. The idea of selling digital assets directly to your users without the need for venture capital to bootstrap online ventures is very powerful. This will undoubtably become a popular way for companies to construct their ecosystems in the future.
And this isn’t even mentioning the centralized institutions whose monetary systems are failing us as well. I can’t pretend to understand the first thing about global finance, but there’s plenty of conversation at the conference about how Social Security is fucked, about the financial systems of Venezuela, Greece, and Syria, how the Euro is in trouble, and how digital currencies can come to the aid of many who global finance has wronged.
There is understandably a lot of skepticism about Ethereum and cryptocurrencies. 95% of cryptocurrencies are pump-and-dump schemes, and Ethereum is constantly berated by the greater community for choosing to hard-fork it’s software back in June to revert a transaction that hacked 14% of the net worth of the ecosystem from a poorly coded smart contract. It was a controversial decision that intentionally betrayed the techno-libertarian idealism that fueled Ethereum’s creation by manually reverting a computationally valid transaction.
There are people I know who work in finance who can’t reconcile any optimism about the future of blockchain with the volatility of the currencies, exchanges being hacked, and the irrational hype around some of the companies in the space. I understand their skepticism, but I disagree with their assessment.
Until you see it for yourself, it’s hard to truly grasp the scope of what is being built. If Ethereum works it will fundamentally change society, and not just the one in the US, Ethereum is a global project. For all the discourse about “Silicon Valley internet money” I think people miss that this has little to do with Silicon Valley, it’s a worldwide effort. The idea of international digital money having value sounds crazy on the surface, but is it any crazier than gold having a 8 trillion dollar market cap? Some metal that looks pretty and sits in a vault somewhere? These digital tokens can actually power applications, churn out arbitrary computation that can power all sorts of novelty. I would honestly rather have the digital asset than a piece of metal. At some point, our monetary system evolved from paper money to credit cards. I can only imagine the hostility when credit cards were introduced. “Plastic cards representing money that lives on a computer? Are you crazy?” But somehow it works. Is cryptocurrency really any crazier?
Ultimately though, my optimism about Ethereum comes from an underlying belief that I have about software. That it’s not about the code, it’s about the people. And the 700 people that flew halfway around the world to present their visions for the future of the internet are not the people that I want to bet against. For a week, the Hyatt on the Bund is the most interesting place to be in Shanghai. A crazy mix of techno-libertarian idealism, serious software development credentials, money, energy, and complete vitriol from the non-believers. And despite the hate, Ethereum moves forward, obsessed with the idea of a more decentralized web. Bet against it at your own peril.

I think it will cost less for them to build their applications on the main Ethereum chain. It will cost them less.

I think it is quite possible that the insurance companies can elect to create their own block chain for the insurance business only.

Sure, anything is possible, but the way that you outline the scenario seems to be a bit ridiculous in terms of specifics.  We have enough going on right now with the various battles within ETH and ETC, so any future coins that develop from that are likely going to be related to forks of one or the other of those two, rather than some attempts at a solidarity coin to combine them.  On the other hand, there is some low level likelihood that somehow the ETH and ETC camps will combine forces in such a way to come to some kind of compromise agreement in which one or another of the forks dies off in order to create one coin from the two (which would likely be branded as ETH, even though it may in essence absorb the ETC ideology of non-mutability and no fucking around intervention into its new perspective)

You seem to be talking about some kind of pure form of theories that do not play out in real application.

Surely, there are going to be some instances in which miners take pure and rational views based on wearing just one hat, but the reality of the matter is that most miners are going to be dabbling and diversifying their investments in a variety of ways and there is going to be a combination of rational thinking and emotional thinking, which causes behavior that is a bit more difficult to quantify into some kind of pure model.



I agree with the first part of your point, and I think that the second point that you are making concerns the low incentive to attack ETC based on its relatively low value... yet it seems to be a wrong conclusion based on the fact that bitcoin has enough computing power security to comfortably and securely support at least a 10x increase in value.  So, I am not really sure what you are getting at with making such BTC/ETC comparisons, when in the end, there is a lot more complicated politics going on with ETC as compared with BTC's more simple foundational use as a financial instrument (I mean bitcoin is extremely secure because the main intention is storage of value and use in those kinds of currency-like applications).



I largely agree with your first point here, yet regarding your second point, it seems dangerous to attempt to pigeon-hole Ethereum too much.  There continues to be a lot of pump and dump dynamic and marketing, etcetera, so I doubt that we can easily write off ethereum and/or its related ETC in the coming several years.  Yeah, sure it may continue to be a kind of valueless scam, but it is likely going to be able to continue to play on its previous marketing and pumping success for quite some time to come in at least the medium term future... In other words, there continue to be a hell of a lot of ETH "true believers" who have not yet caught on to the scam nature of the way the whole Ethereum marketplace has played out to date.

Is there any possibility that a rich organisation create a new Etheruem clone saying that the ETH is a fork, and ETC is a hack that people should use the new coins?

I don't believe that.  Even if a miner is a speculator, he has the choice between mining and buying.  If buying is cheaper than mining, there's no reason to mine.  In principle, in a liquid mining market, the hash rate is determined by current price only.

But that is at the same time also the answer: if the price is low, the hash rate is low, and the "security" is low, but the incentive to attack is low too !  Why would you spend a lot of money to attack a chain that doesn't contain much value ?

For years, bitcoin's chain has been less secure than ETC's chain right now. 


Economically you are right, and I'm also of the same opinion, *in as much that ETC/ETH have some genuine value proposition (like a smart contract platform that is actually *used*) *.  But in as much as ETC and ETH are simply abstract speculator's tokens with no other usage, then anything goes, because it is a pure recursive belief system.  There doesn't even need to be a block chain or code.  Only IOU on exchanges.  They are then simply betting tokens and that is really totally arbitrary.

My idea is that ethereum, as a platform, is essentially dead apart from some betting games, and ponzi contracts.  What remains is a set of better's tokens.

Sure that is a decent point, but even if turning off miners is part of the motivation, it is likely an inadequate motivation because we cannot assume that miners are creatures that only act upon the current price, they are also speculators, and there still remains some questions regarding what makes ETH more valuable than ETC.  Merely because some folks ETH proponents drive down ETC prices, they are only going to be able to sustain such driving down for a limited period of time.. sooner or later they will run out of coins and sooner or later ETC will begin to rebound. 

Ultimately, there is no real logic that institutionally approved ETH should be nearly 10x more valuable than non-institutionally supported ETC... and there are also some arguments that ETC is more valuable without having as much centralization and mutability... so in essence there are decent arguments that can be made that the two coins are going to approach parity, whether that takes several years or whether that takes ETH going down in value or ETC going up in value is likely more of a longer term projection, assuming that both coins can endure the short term pumps and dumps and ongoing inter battling.

The idea of lowering the price is to turn off miners from supporting the ETC chain. If the hashing power goes down then it would be less secure and more open to attacks. Remember if miners do not find it profitable to mine ETC they will go somewhere else to mine. The likely destination for them would be ETH which is what the ETH people want.

So?  What is that going to do?  Temporarily drive down the price of ETC and cause fewer ETC coins to be held by ETH holders, and then after that will the ETC price bounce back or not?  Is ETC going to be dead?  A lowering of the ETC price might cause a lot of buying of ETC, then what?

Are you talking about "should have done"?  That is water under the bridge.  What is done has been done.  ETC is here, and it is very likely that ETH foundation fucked up in the way that they implemented the hardfork and their lack of due diligence before they jumped into such a quagmire.

I think that will happen in the next few weeks with the Foundation to dump ETC and so will some big holders of the ETC.

The Ethereum Foundation should make clear it would kill the other fork to keep the main chain, then there will be no ETC.

Yeah.. right...

That's not how a hardfork works.  You must be thinking about a softfork, if you think that you are going to slowly merge folks into the dominant chain.   

In fact, the ETH foundation jumped to a fairly rash conclusion and had been throwing around the idea of fork for quite some time, and really they had forked before; however, this particular latest fork happened to be a bit more controversial than they had expected.

Yeah, if they had clarified that the hardfork was not controversial, before they did it, then it would not have been a problem.  Instead they acted rashly.

That certainly eth will give something good for the future. We just have to wait for an extraordinary life on this earth, because we need time to do it all. Still delight in the way this world and life we never envied (negative) about the success of a person. So just give the spirit knows

I think the hard fork was not implemented properly. They should declare that they would not support anyother fork during the time.