On The Etherium Hard Fork

[Bagatell]

"I’m much less concerned about the ups and downs of any given week, month, or year. I don’t even care which currency ultimately “wins” (there will probably be multiple winners). The end state of the world I want to see is one with an open financial system for the world, where everyone has equality of opportunity around financial services.


https://medium.com/the-coinbase-blog/on-the-ethereum-hard-fork-780f1577e986#.mivwx34f6

 

[freetrader]

According to Vitalik, a substantial portion of people buying ETC where bitcoin small blockers.

I don't think Vitalik would just say that if he couldn't substantiate it.

This fork is certainly turning out to be a rich source of drama, with allegations of insider involvement now being leveled, and the legal threats.

I do hope that is not a portent of things to come for Bitcoin's first fork. Perhaps I'm too naive, and people will just do whatever they think they can get away with, especially if they feel protected.

Brian's got my respect for his attitude towards an open crypto future. Even if Bitcoin is not a success but just an enabler for such a future, it will have served its purpose.

 

[sickpig]

in my humble opinion ethereum difficult retargeting mechanism has played a big role on the duality we are currently seeing, I.e. the coexistence of ETH and ETC.

if net difficulty hadn't be recalculated after each block I doubt that the txs replying attack we are seeing would have been viable.

in the case of wider retargeting interval, let say 2016 blocks, replying a transaction, just happened on the stronger chain, on the weaker chain hoping it will be included in a block in a timely fashion is a lot more difficult than it currently is on ETH.

let's take as example an hypothetical bitcoin fork.

suppose that the hash power on the weaker chain is 25% of the original computational power. that means that as soon as the fork happens the minority chain will produce a new block on avg every 45 mins rather than every 10.

So even if an attacker is replying your txs on the other chain this does not mean it will be included in the next block, because the "slower" chain simply will not be able to keep up the pace.

Another critical point is that this situation will last a lot longer than the usual 2 weeks (2016 blks solved every 10 mins), in the worst case scenario it could take 2 months (if the fork will happen just at the beginning of a retarget interval).

Under that light I think the Bitcoin retargeting algo could be seen as another stroke of genius. It could be just luck, I doubt that, nevertheless is something that put in place incentives to favour the survival of only one chain in a post hard fork scenario.

edit: grammar

 

[Bagatell]

Given the fresh interest in wallets that the fork has caused I can't help but wonder about the connections between core, ETC and Monero.

 

[freetrader]

@sickpig : I liked your post for the fact that it pointed out this crucial current difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin in the context of the current ETH fork and the prospect of a Bitcoin HF.

However, I disagree about this conclusion:

Under that light I think the Bitcoin retargeting algo could be see as another stroke of genius.

I think the 2 week retargeting makes attempts to hard-fork using the same POW far too difficult (almost impossible?), and in my view that has two direct consequences:

1. the first hard fork that attempts to challenge the status quo will get rid of this and move to much faster retargeting (it's just a logical step necessary for it to have any chance of survival). I very much doubt there will be a 'going-back' to increase the retargeting period after the first successful hard fork.
   
   
2. it incentivizes a hard-fork to do a change of POW vs. keeping the current POW

The first one I'm neutral about, but it also means (to me) that it wasn't a stroke of genius, but just relatively arbitrary design choice that would have to yield to the realities of a forking competition at a later point. Like the 1MB spam limit.

For the second, I think it is disadvantageous because in the absence of other driving goals such as increasing decentralization, it is burdensome to have to change POW with every fork. There's no fundamentally good reason to throw away a proven, secure POW function just for the sake of bifurcating to achieve an unrelated goal (like increasing blocksize). Although it would keep more computer scientists employed
To put it differently, with the long retargeting gone, I think this would increase the chances of keeping the existing POW, and this is another pressure to get rid of the long retargeting.

 

[sickpig]

@freetrader

I suppose that everything depends on the main purpose you want to achieve using the HF.

If the main goal is amending/improving the protocol at the consensus level as core devs are doing by the means of soft-forks, I think that the 2016 blks interval is a good thing to have.

My comment has not be read under the assumption of HF as a recurring and fair mechanism to improve the Bitcoin protocol/ledger.

For the other case you mentioned, I think that the lower frequency (it's not that we have to change the status quo every Tuesday) of such forks will somehow justify the need to change POW algorithm.

However, I've to say that the best course of action in the scenario you described will be the use of a spin off rather than an actual HF, just like your're doing with the project started by @rocks.

 

[Bloomie]

The most ironic part is that the fork was created to save DAO, and ETC is what's making speculators abandon DAO now.

 

[freetrader]

It may be that the market decides to value immutability over bleeding-edge unproven smart contract applications.

Sound money first, then contracts?

 

[Zangelbert Bingledack]

Sound money requires not switching ledgers, which overturns the whole idea of altcoins. ETC is itself the anti-altcoin, while being an altcoin with respect to Bitcoin (but not to ETH), which is why it is already trading at 1/3 the ETH price. The Ethereum Foundation hasn't sold its ETC yet, lucky for them.

The market separates the wheat from the chaff, taking any good contributions and nixing the rest. The same needs to happen to Core. It needs to have its rough edges sanded forked away. Greg needs to get his rough edges forked away like what is happening with Vitalik.