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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean that there are now two Ethereum blockchains running concurrently?

Ugh, yes. The minority who didn't want the hard fork have continued to use the old chain. They constantly try to promote it and troll the 'bailout chain'.

It was supposed to be a vote on whether to fork or not, then leave the deprecated chain behind. The vote for the fork succeeded, and all the developers of Ethereum and 99% of the developers for apps on the chain have decided to go with the vote. Everything is being done on the main chain, ETH, Ethereum. The old deprecated chain is now called ETC, they named themselves Ethereum Classic.

Why ugh? They want to support the old chain for ideological reasons, what's the problem with that? Isn't that the whole point of these blockchain systems (i.e. that a centralized authority does not control the system)? I am a pretty big blockchain critic, but schadenfreude aside, I think the eth/etc split is a decent demonstration of the fact that these systems have legitimate resistance to centralized authority, even when ethereum's influential creator is the authority. It's not stable and eth's buggy contracts are not reliable, but as far as blockchain money goes it has lived up to the ideals of the enthusiasts.

The vitriol in r/ethereum is an amazing sight. There are cult-like levels of declarations of support for either chain. It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system, and that prior to the DAO 'theft', everyone seemed to be proponents of the 'code is law' viewpoint. How quickly things change, and how little time it takes for people to switch their beliefs and villify those who still hold the old beliefs.

It's certainly fun to watch the fallout...

It's about the same as your typical video game console war, really.

Except the vocabulary is smarter. This only highlights the point that human hate for each other is orthogonal to apparent reasons behind it.

The ETH camp still defends the "code is law" principle. The point in which ETH and ETC proponents differ is how that principle should be prioritized relative to "the majority is always right" principle.

> It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system

They aren't at all. Immutable smart contracts are the basis of ETC and not ETH. It's only one difference, but it's a difference as fundamental as the difference between gold and dollars.

ETH is now a centralized currency. I have trouble seeing any purpose to using ETH now that it's centralized, given that existing centralized money/contract systems are much more mature. But given both ETH and ETC are too buggy for me to use, I've no skin in the game, so I'm happy to wait and see if some benefit to a centralized cryptocurrency emerges that I wasn't aware of.

Doesn't this episode illustrate that ETC could go the way of ETH, whenever the miners decide? ETH was always ETH, it just took a while for people to realize it.

Mathematically yes, there's nothing preventing ETC from doing the same thing. But ideologically, the lines have been drawn. At least for the time being, I think it's a safe bet that people who aren't committed to decentralization will just go with ETH instead of investing in ETC and voting for future forks.

Again though, I think the design of both cryptocurrencies is prohibitively error-prone, so it's kind of a moot point.

No, ETC will still be ETC, new forks will just get new monikers. I'm holding out for ET-TNG.

There was no real voting. A tiny tiny percentage of owners voted for or against the fork, mostly because there was no official voting system publicised.

Why couldn't they just fork to ETH (majority rule) and ETC (contracts inviolate) and let the voting mechanism be a currency exchange contract between the two?

If you prefer ETC, you trade all your ETH for ETC, and vice versa. The "winner" is the currency with the higher valuation, but everyone can still use whatever fork they prefer.

That's what is happening right now, but the currency exchange is happening on Poloniex, Kraken, etc, and the hashing power is following the exchange rate.

Yes, ETC(original) and ETH(forked). You can find some comparisons at http://www.etc-eth.com/

I suppose that implies that I can "double spend" my ETH that were bought pre-fork, then? Where can I do this?

You'll need to use a splitter function. Shapeshift.io has one available. You will need to set up a new ETH and ETC address beforehand.

Kinda. You can't do a regular double spend, where you spend the same currency twice (And thus get twice the value out of it, kinda). You could spend the coins in ETH, and then spend the coins in ETC, two different currencies worth different amounts.

The catch is that there is no guarantee you come out ahead, like there would normally be with a double spend. The fork resulted in a price drop (That has now somewhat recovered), and ETC is not worth nearly as much as ETH (About a 10:1 ratio). So ETC+ETH is really not worth much more then ETH was originally before the fork, if it is at all - even if you spend both, you probably didn't make any money on the fork itself.

I don't have hard numbers. Let's suppose that you had 1ETH(old), then now you have 1ETH(new) + 1ETC, and you can expend both. The 1ETC(new) in the forked chain and the 1ETC in the unforked chain.

But the price dropped, so if you had $1 in the ETH(old) then now you have $0.80 in ETH(new) and $0.2 in ETC, so you didn't get free money, only free tokens that you can try to exchange for money in the right place.

(Actually, I guess that the sum after the split is lower because some investor ruined away, so the numbers can be $1->$.7+$.2 or something.)

And beware that since both have the same underlaying technology, then some can copy some transactions from one blockchain to the other, because the signature to transfer the coins is the same in both chains. The solution is to make two "tainted" versions of the coins that are disallowed to transfer in the other chain. Read the sibling comment about the "splitter function".

Yes.

Though of course only one (ETH) is the 'official' Ethereum chain. But that in and of itself is being debated.

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