Topic: Ethereium Classic is a reminder of why Bitcoin must never hard fork (Read 3259 times)

Bitcoin is father of all coins!

It seems that the ETC might hard fork as well.

https://news.bitcoin.com/ethereum-plans-hard-fork-twice/

What the Experts Tweeted about the Ethereum Hard Fork, Ethereum Classic

Malicious Actors Attacking the Ethereum Network

EthereumOver the past few weeks, the Ethereum network has seen troubling times. An attacker or group of actors has been “crafty” by finding attack vectors to hinder the network.

Lead developers believe the exploits have been due to the low cost of “gas,” which powers Ethereum smart contracts. The low gas prices have given the attacker the ability to threaten the network with constant denial of service attacks.

The official Ethereum blog explains the need for a hard fork stating:

“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.”

The hard fork is intended to raise gas prices to make it more difficult for the attacker to disrupt the Ethereum blockchain and clients. Currently, exchanges have been having difficulty with Ether withdrawals and deposits due to extremely slow confirmation times. ShapeShift revealed on October 13 that this is affecting Ethereum assets such as REP and Digix DGD. According to social media and Ethereum forums, the cost of gas will be considerably higher after the fork.

Block 2457000 and the Second Hard Fork

forkMany in the Ethereum community seem to support this planned hard fork. The first hard fork during the summer was very controversial and led to some unexpected results.

The last fork was contentious because the network broke its immutability and reversed a third-party application’s mistake. This maneuver, many believe, is more like a patch and will not see the same results.

The Ethereum blog recommends all miners to lower the gas limit to 500K gas. The hard fork created from EIP 150 version 1c will start at block height 2457000. Martin Swende says, “this will reprice certain operations to correspond better to the underlying computational complexity.” Following the uncontroversial fork, the developer says a second hard fork will commence shortly after.

“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,” explains Swende.

All Eyes Will Be Watching Ethereum’s Next Forks

The entire cryptocurrency community will once again watch this network and community shuffle towards a fix. On the Ethereum subreddit, there has been some infighting about the fork, with discussions mainly focused on the DAO refund. Some have even expressed concern about the birth of another Ethereum offshoot like Ethereum Classic. Others are having a difficult time trying to understand the second “state-bloat” fork.

Ethereum developers say they have implemented the necessary changes within clients and are testing for “consensus-breaking vulnerabilities.” The hard fork seems pretty much definite, and most of the community members are following the lead developers advice. Furthermore, Ethereum engineers have also added the fork to the Ethereum Bug Bounty. Community members are encouraged to search for attack vectors and bugs for a reward.

You do realise that ETH was up against a tight deadline to hardfork. We didn't take the action lightly. When all is said and done it was the right thing to do. Thieves should never prosper.

Maybe I didn't explain myself accordingly. I meant that Bitcoin must never hard fork in a stupid rushed way, a hard fork must be conservative and for real reasons, not some bullshit hack or a hypothetical apocalypse if we don't raise the blocksize by tomorrow.

There is no problem of double spending in the Etheruem. For the small coins with less hashing power, there could be such problems.

double spending for what for the malleability issue? i thought that was only an exchange issue and was fixed already with last version, bitcoin only need other few update to be really the best one

Bitcoin has some pretty big problems, the double spend exploits are getting pretty rampant now and their system of devoting all their rewards to hashing gives you pretty extreme diminishing rewards.
DASH will be the future, after evolution launches next year

A soft fork has the "advantage" that it is compulsory if you have a majority of miners with you, no matter what your users think.
In other words, with a soft fork, if you have 51% of the miners with you, you can shove it down the throats of the whole community.
A hard fork only needs ONE miner to disagree, and the other chain lives on.  Next, the users will determine the relative market caps, and in the end, the mining that depends on the market cap (the block reward and the difficulty determine the profitability).

But I don't see how bitcoin could avoid hard forking.  If I were to invent an altcoin, I would design it as a fork from bitcoin, to solve the issue of initial distribution, to have directly a large user base (all bitcoin holders get "free money" and become directly coin holders) and to have a serious kicking off its trading.

It is very strange that most alts start new chains with a new genesis block, instead of using the bitcoin chain as point of departure.

Hardforking is fine.  Hardforking to steal money, no matter the reason why, is very controversial and bound to cause problems.

I do not think there will be a hard fork for the bitcoin. There will be only soft forks. That is much safer.

ETC will rally which will be the exact reason they'll use to fork Bitcoin. 

That is my hope as well. That will make the mining a good business. Otherwise we have to find places for those GPU.

I hope ETC forks to become PoW only and ETH forks to become PoS so ETC has a bigger reason to exist, differentiation is key and PoW+immutable is great.

For the time being, it is up to the ETC holders to decide if they want to update. In the future, it will have nothing to do with ETH.

Solidity Version 0.3.6 Released. Should the ETC holders upgrade their wallet?

https://github.com/ethereum/solidity/releases/tag/v0.3.6

in no way did a hard fork ever mean the price would not go up, and i also do not believe the big dump is coming, as its not the most profitable way for the hacker to sell of his stack

The Ethereum Foundation has fewer ETC than the black hat hacker and the white hat hacker. So the hackers are more important.

Getting the Ethereum foundation out might actually do it a world of good.
These dumps were the last weapons of the ETH brigade. Now there is no more hold that ETH backers have on ETC.

The ETC investors need to be rich enough to absorb the dump of the DAO hackers and the Ethereum Foundation.

The ETC price has recovered somewhat. It seems the ETC investors are quite rich, they can absorb big dump.