For the last few days the ETC/ETH market has been manipulated by the miners. Take a look at this:
Each one of the bumps on this graph is a large miner manipulating the price. Here is how it works:
- They have some significant amount of hash power that they control. Let's say 100GH/s.
- They originally that hash power towards the ETH chain.
- They buy some ETC. Let's say @ 0.18 ETC/ETH.
- They point the hashing power towards the ETC chain.
- This in turn increases the % of hash power on the ETC chain as opposed to the ETH chain.
- All the traders see the increase in power of the ETC chain and adjust their buy and sell orders to match the new market conditions. So, say ETC now has 20% of the hash power, the ETC/ETH pair now starts trading at 0.2 (up from 0.18 in #3).
- They now have made a 10% profit (0.18/0.2) just by switching chains.
If you take a closer look at the graph you'll actually see a trading volume spike before the price starts going up. This is more then likely the scenario I am referring to here, miners buying up ETC before switching their rigs over the ETC chain.
Why this hurts everyone
One could argue that the miners control the security of the both block chains so why shouldn't they profit from switching over to whatever chain they want to support? The problem here is that these guys are not switching over for some moral reason, they are simply doing it for profit. The ETC chain is more profitable to mine and they can make a mint up front. From a short term financial perspective this makes sense, the market effectively encourages them to do so.
If this continues what will eventually happen is actually that the ETH chain becomes more profitable to mine and ETC miners will now have a financial incentive to switch back over to ETH. Each time they switch they create more price volatility in their wake, bringing more speculation to the price of both ETH and ETC.
Price volatility doesn't benefit anyone in the long term. It scares newbies and potential investors from trying to buy into the Ethereum project on either side. It scares merchants form dealing with the crypto coin and most importantly it distracts the whole community from building useful DApps on top of Ethereum. Basically it erodes away the Ethereum value proposition for a quick buck.
Without some form of a penalty for miners switching from one chain to another this is all but inevitable... or maybe the proof of stake algorithm will finally be rolled out and save both chains from impeding doom.
Think I am off my rocker and that this is nothing more than a conspiracy theory or do you agree with me? Let me know.