Following the recent fork of Ethereum to retrieve the "stolen" DAO funds the old chain has been continued by those who opposed the precedent of censorship set by the hard fork.
This has become known as Ethereum Classic (ETC).
It was expected by most people that ETC would just quietly go off and die - those small number of miners using persisting the old chain would just give up and follow the herd.
However, the surprise listing on Poloniex Exchange today has lead to a surge in price with ETC trading at about 7% of the value of ETH. The volume has hit over 19,000 BTC on this particular exchange (ranking at number 2 with ETH at 43000 BTC) which makes it about 44% of the ETH volume.
I have also been hearing from fellow miners that they are switching to mining ETC due to the lower hash rate potentially giving them greater rewards. I am also going to switch over myself as an experiment to see how it works out - unfortunately I sold off most of my mining GPUs long ago so can only do so with a single gaming GPU now.
It would be interesting to see if we end up in the situation where the ETC hash rate (whilst not equal to ETH) is at a respectable level compared to ETH and is greater than many other big altcoins.
The current difficulty for ETC is about 2.5 TH here compared to around 61.78 TH for ETH here - this would suggest a hash rate of about 4% for ETC compared with ETH.
(Unfortunately I wasn't able to find a block explorer for ETC that displayed the exact hashrate if you know of one please let me know.)
Could this be a black swan moment?
If so what does this mean for ETH?
Could ETC prevail over ETH?
Let me know what you think below? Are you a miner - if so which chain are you mining and why?
Edit:
Interesting article here: Zsolt Felfoldl one of the ethereum foundation developers has just made a post in support of ETC:
https://medium.com/p/a-tale-of-two-chains-3f6d58a9df4a
Thanks to @qumatru on twitter for pointing this out but there is already a mining pool for ETC:
http://ethc.epool.io/
(Ether Classic logo linked from: Ether Classic Website)