Interesting to see how different people are interpreting the ETH/ETC split.
Anti-forkers: "See! We were right. Hard forks
are dangerous, especially when they're 'contentious,' because they
can result in a persistent chain split."
Pro-forkers: "Isn't this great? Hodlers unaffected, or actually, benefited. The combined market cap of the two chains is greater than the pre-fork market cap. And everybody gets to have the rule set they're comfortable with such that minority rights are being respected."
A few thoughts:
I think it's fine to acknowledge that a persistent chain split is "bad" from an all-else-equal perspective. While holders don't have to make an election between the two chains, there is still going to be a loss of network effect as some people elect to sell off their A-chain coins for more B-chain coins (and others do the opposite). And there's also an unavoidable increase in transactional friction created by, e.g., the need to deal with replay attacks. Of course, to the extent that these types of persistent (or at least semi-persistent) splits continue to occur, I think that friction should be expected to decrease over time as we "get better at forking" and exchanges, wallets, etc. figure out how to deal with the issues these splits create.
But precisely because there are costs associated with persistent chain splits, we should expect them to occur only when the benefits they provide outweigh those costs. And you could certainly make the case that this appears to be being borne out by the current ETH / ETC combined valuation.
Saw this quote from /u/LovelyDay that I think summarizes the situation well:
"The systemic risk of forking is one that is inherent in free software crypto, it's not something that can be prevented by declaring 'contentious hard fork cannot happen'."
Another point that I think is important when attempting to apply lessons from the ETH / ETC split to Bitcoin is that the differences that led to the Ethereum fork were truly "irreconcilable." The dispute over whether to roll back those transactions couldn't be deferred. In other words, unlike with the Bitcoin block size issue, it wasn't a debate over a particular "feature" (i.e., bigger blocks) that could always be added later (thereby stealing the challenger's thunder). (The "feature" in the Ethereum case is essentially "immutability." Kind of hard to get that one back.) That difference is why I still doubt the viability of a minority hashpower "big block" fork of Bitcoin, what I previously called the "
fork now, gain market share later" approach.
I'm not really sure how I expect the ETH / ETC split to play out over the medium term. On the one hand, the larger network should be a very powerful Schelling point. On the other, so is the chain that actually comports with the original vision for ethereum (as still described on the ethereum.org website) of a "decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference." (Of course, over the
long term, I doubt the viability of either chain as the entire project seems pretty ill-conceived to me.)
