Chinese Miner Remorse and Implications for Bitcoin
For those of you living under a rock for the past 3 months, here is a quick recap of the drama surrounding an alternative crypto currency known as Ethereum.
Many members of the Ethereum team made what is widely considered the first Decentralized Autonomous Organization; the idea that a company built on code, could run itself in a peer-to-peer fashion. The DAO was heralded as a modern marvel of programming prowess. It crowdfunded over $100M within a matter of weeks. However, soon after the launch, there was a hack which drained several million dollars worth of the Ethereum from the DAO. The Ethereum team quickly decided to hard fork and make the hack non-existent with the help of several large scale miners. One in particular is a good friend of mine, Chandler Guo, who currently owns over 30% of the ethereum network hashrate.
In a recent conversation with Chandler he shared a video about his remorse over helping Vitalik Buterin fork Ethereum.
Chandler after the fact did a short interview with me stating why he specifically had some remorse.
Chandler said that he feels very strongly that so-called immutable ledgers, should in fact remain immutable. “Immutable Ledgers must remain immutable”, he stated. “We currently have 120GH/s in our 6 locations, and going forward we will use all of it for Ethereum Classic.” The future of this once abandoned secondary chain now looks bright!
The question remains, what does all of this mean for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been at an impasse on the forking issue for quite a while. Overall, if a fork were to take place that is not in consensus with the majority population, then the likely scenario would be that there are two valued chains post-fork. This signals strong contention and would more than likely drive prices down and cause Venture funding to pull out of the ecosystem. However, what seems to be happening at this current juncture is nothing is happening. Which may be for the best. If no clear consensus can be made, and a fork occurs, then the odds of their being two valuable chains is exceedingly high.
What the future holds for bitcoin is unknown at this point, however, taking lessons from a failed and rushed consensus change in a competing currency is a must!
