With Ethereum about to go to proof of stake an interesting part of the crypto community is starting to take shape and it might have some very legitimate cases of being the next big thing.
Below is a graph of ETC (Ethereum Classics price as of one year taken from CoinGecko.
Many years ago there was a single blockchain called Ethereum. This blockchain started in July 2015. In 2016 this blockchain was hacked and with it the DAO theft of millions of Ethereum. The result of about 5% at the time or 3.64 million ETH.
Because of this it was decided by the team to fork the blockchain and write off these tokens as dead tokens meaning no one could use them they simply wouldn't exist anymore.
Remember this was a time when Ethereum was really about the only other competitor to Bitcoin there was Litecoin a maybe five others at the time in terms of blockchains. The idea was it's fair game and a decentralized blockchain is fair game so if it gets hacked for millions well that's too bad.
While a part of me agrees with this another part of me says a hacker should not be rewarded unless they are a white hat hacker so being able to remove those stolen tokens seems like it should be fair game as well. However... Putting that up to a vote if it ever happens again I feel would be a better option from token holders.
Ethereum has implemented a lot of changes over the years. While not everyone agrees with them the price of Ethereum says otherwise. The most recent biggest changes come from removing rewards from miners and starting to implement a steady fee that's always running and burned. This is starting to pave the way for the Proof of Stake move which from the looks of it should be coming early this summer or some time this summer.
This change from Proof of Work and Proof of stake is going to make millions of GPUs no longer have jobs. However it does seem like some people are looking at Ethereum classic as a possible option to support once that happens.
ETC or Ethereum classic keeps the old method of mining and also the original blockchain with the stolen Ethereum in it. It's been hit a number of times over the years however due to it's low difficulty of mining since most miners are mining Ethereum right now compared to the Ethereum classic change it does put it under a constant 51% hack threat.
At the time of writing this Ethereum Classics hash rate is at 21.93 TH/s which is almost an all time high for that network. This time last year it was 2 to 4 TH's. Now compare that to Ethereums current hash rate of 1.07 PH/s which is 1,070 TH/s you can see how much of a threat it is when it possibly kicks over to all that mining power to Ethereum classic. Even if it's just 10% of that mining power.
The bet right now is that when that happens this year that Ethereum Classic will become popular to miners so they can continue to put those GPUs to work. This might be that one time we see if mining power does in fact equate to a higher price as many predicted years ago.
What are you thoughts on Ethereum classic and what will happen?
