A few questions for Bob Summerwill
Jan 26th, 2019 | Written by Max Hinchman and Eric Choy
Ethereum Classic is a Proof of Work smart contract platform that was established as a result of a hard fork with its sister network, Ethereum, in 2016. Its coin, ETC, is currently trading at $8.67 with a total market cap of about $1 billion USD.
Without going into too much detail (many articles have already covered it), Ethereum Classic was established after hard fork that occurred due to a disagreement within the Ethereum community regarding how to resolve the DAO Attack in 2016.
During the 2017 “crypto-bubble”, ETC hit its peak price of about $42 in January of 2018. After persevering through the “crypto-winter” of 2018, it then became the victim of a 51% attack that occurred in January 2019. While many at the time stated that that the 51% attack was effectively the beginning of its end, Ethereum Classic is still continuing to make progress. The most recent big development was the completion of the “Agharta” hard fork that gives the network more interoperability with its sister network, Ethereum. In addition, Ethereum Classic has continued to maintain its well-regarded network of loyal developers that stand by the belief that Proof of Work is the only proper layer-1 consensus mechanism.
The Ethereum Classic Cooperative just recently secured $1.1 million in additional funding for the next 2 years from Grayscale Investments, and is well-equipped for now to continue to compete against the many other smart contract platforms. We recently had a chance to ask Bob Summerwill a few questions about Ethereum Classic’s past and its outlook for the future.
BSJ: There are quite a few in the community that have acknowledged that even though Ethereum is a Turing-Complete system, there are limitations in its current form. As a result, many are calling on Ethereum to just focus on nurturing its DeFi ecosystem. What are your thoughts on the limitations and how does this affect Ethereum Classic moving forward?
Those limitations are really on talking about scalability more than functionality. Some operations (like heavy cryptography) are too expensive to run on-chain at the moment. That can be partially resolved by adding precompiles, but ultimately anything very computionally expensive or throughput sensitive is likely to move up into L2 chains. The laws of physics are the constraint there. You just cannot stuff EVERYTHING into a single-threaded computer and expect that to scale. It is impossible. Sharding helps, but then you have a new problem — syncronization of cross-shard communications.
I think ETC would be great for DeFi where there is less need for massive throughput and more need for stability and security. If you are building financial instruments which might be expected to persist for decades then stability and sustainability is paramount. It usually does not matter if you do not get instant finality. With a hard money native token and the same Ethereum smart contract functionality as ETH, I think that ETC absolutely hits a sweet spot there.
Also, as a global registry.
The success of DeFi on ETH demonstrates the value there, but ETH is not the stable foundation which I think is really needed for a persisting ecosystem. Even just the uncertainty around ETH2 transition, about how sharding might play out, and about whether POS staking will turn into an oligarchy should be worrying to anybody building DeFi instruments on ETH. Donald MyIntyre has a great analogy here. ETC is an armored car where ETH(2) is a sports car. Both have their uses. If you want throughput and scalability then ETH2 is your answer. But for assets which you want to hold in the long-term where throughput is NOT the top-priority, ETC certainly looks like a better option to me.
BSJ: Ethereum Classic is still here a year after the 51% attack that many called should have been the end of the network. What have been the key things that took place last year for your developers/contributors to remain committed to Ethereum Classic and continue to work towards achieving the significant growth that is needed?
The attacks taught us some important lessons about 51% attacks and common misunderstanding about the potential damage which they can cause. Reorganizations are local phenomen and 51% attacks do not affect all network participants. They just target individual node operators (usually exchanges) who have poor risk models. Some great articles on this point:
ETC is still vulnerable to 51% attacks as a minority Ethash chain. The cost to attack ETC is still relatively low (https://www.crypto51.app/) and there is lots of rentable hash available. No “fix” is required per-se. That is just the nature of POW.
Having said that there is quite broad consensus that a move to Keccak256 for the mining hash would be a good move to ensure ETC’s long term security and ETC ecosystem is in general NOT supportive of ASIC resistance.
Key things which took place:
1. Investment in ETC Core team and other projects by ETC Labs.
2. Fresh engagement of some key individuals “from Ethereum” into the ETC ecosystem — myself, Afri Schoedon, Wei Tang, Zac Mitton.
3. Successful Atlantis fork in September which moved ETC forward massively and in which we learnt to work together as “frenemies” where divisions within the ETC community (together with lack of money) had previously hindered forward progress.
4. Gathering development moment and progress of the protocol snowballing into increased faith and interest in ETC. The “protest coin with no developers” meme is firmly in the back window. We are doing real work and that is being reflected in the growing $ETC price. ETC was briefly #10 on CoinMarketCap, and the onchainfx metrics also reflect that ETC has moved up into the top tier in the past month. The fact that ETC will have Instanbul opcodes and be ETH-compatible within the next two months has been noticed. When I talk to Ethereum projects about ETC they understand and are interested.
We are well past the “100% ETH” phase where ETC is treated with distain. A good part of that, I think, is due to the growth of blockchain as a whole. With the rate of growth we have, most participants are by definition new and these old battles are like ancient history to them. They neither know nor care about who said what or who did what.
For several years it was the case that you needed to be ideologically motivated to use ETC. It was objectively a much worse developer experience due to the age of the protocol and many, many missing pieces of infrastructure — to the level as basic as not having a good Block Explorer. All of that is in the rear window. ETC is now appealing to developers on an objective basis — whatever their ideological beliefs.
BSJ: How is Ethereum Classic positioning itself going forward?
There is broad consensus in the ETC ecosystem that ETC will remain POW into the indefinite future. There is no need for any “partnerships”. Multiple layer 2 technologies can be built on top of ETC. It is permissionless. All of the Ethereum L2 technologies (state channels, ZK Rollups, Optimistic roll ups, Enigma/Moonlight/Zeth/Zether/AZTEC) will “just work” on ETC as well.
The plan for ETC is NOT to scale the L1. There is no love for sharding, for state rent, for excessive gas limit (which is equivalent to “big blocks” for Bitcoin) at L1 because those compromise security and decentralization. These are best implemented at L2 levels, IMHO.
As far dapps, those can certainly be built directly on ETC at the moment, but the likelihood is that low-value transactions will eventually find their way up into L2 and higher chains as the fee market develops. Just like Bitcoin.
Additional Recommended Articles/Videos from Bob
https://medium.com/@pyskell/your-exchange-needs-more-confirmations-the-bitconf-measure-872b69babc8f
https://ecips.ethereumclassic.org/ECIPs/ecip-1049
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