Selling my ETHC (or how an Ethereum anti-forker learned to stop worrying and love the fork 100%)

As an anti-forker, about a week ago I wrote about how Eth Classic could possibly overtake Ethereum:



If you’re considering holding ETH or ETHC, then the question is whether it is more likely than the 10-15% which ETHC’s valuation currently fluctuates as a % of Ether. If you think it’s more than 10-15% likely, then Ethereum Classic (ETHC) is undervalued relative to Ethereum (ETH). Of course, if you think it’s less than 10-15%, then ETHC is relatively overvalued.



Since that time, Ethereum Classic has gone from 12.5% of Ethereum’s market cap to 40% and then retrenched a bit back towards around 25.

That’s crazy. I’m selling ETC (or ETHC, whatever you call it). 25% is absurdly crazy. 40% is surreal.





Ethereum is a platform for app development. The apps are going with Ethereum

Basically all important known current projects are going with Ethereum:

Interestingly, the one project going with ETHC is a dark market, exactly what I was worried about. Apparently, the notification that they are going with ETHC is only available on TOR.



Ultimately, a clone of Ethereum’s decentralized app platform that doesn’t have developers that use it just don’t have a purpose to exist.







Blockchain as a service and big banks are likely going with Ethereum

Paul Vigna of the Wall Street Journal reports support for Ethereum vs the fork:



Microsoft Corp. last year integrated Ethereum-based tools into its business-services platform, Azure, and has been among the technology’s most prominent backers. The company said it is not concerned about the competition between the factions, and has not seen any disruptions to projects from its customers. “We are happy with the successful fork,” said Marley Grey, the company’s director of BizDev & Strategy for Blockchain. “If anything, the successful implementation of the hard fork has further established Ethereum as a defacto standard for enterprise consortia networks.”







The black market scenario seems possible, but the more I think about it, the more I think it is implausible.

A Silk Road type of dark market takes a long time to develop. How long depends on what exactly which parts of the software stack they build on Ethereum.



Regardless, developing a dark market will take a substantial amount of time even if it’s already in development. It’s not clear exactly what percent of the software stack makes more sense in Ethereum, but to date as far as I can tell most of the Silk Road clones haven’t tried to build in Ethereum as far as I know.



As far as I know, the Daemon Dark Market is the first. [In general, it’s always been surprising tome how few black and gray market types are developing on Ethereum, given that it seems like many might be the early adopters.]



I’d guess these sites are a long way away from launching. By which time, I am not entirely sure that Ethereum Classic will still exist, but given Ethereum’s current financials, I am confident that Ethereum will still exist.



In a practical sense, Ethereum and its clone may be equally immutable



What Vitalik said about immutability makes a ton of sense.



They had a few weeks to do this hard fork, and it still felt rushed.



Also, forking will only get increasingly harder to do:



Also see:

Ethereum essentially hard-forked because Vitalik decided that he was in favor of it, but they might not have pulled it off if The DAO’s structure hadn’t given them weeks to fork.



Ethereum is a project aimed at decentralization that (paradoxically) will be somewhat centralized at the beginning, but will eventually become increasingly decentralized. In the long run, it’s not clear that ETC will practically be more immutable.







Who is Ethereum Classic?

Who are the developers? Can you trust their software? Will they stick around long-term?

Since I was against the fork, I considered supporting the non-fork project.



Ultimately, I chose not to. Most of the core developers chose to remain anonymous. In cryptocurrencies, this is a very bad sign. Pump and dumps often follow (ie, they take you from 12.5% of relative market cap to 40%)

I also considered mining. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to spend the time reviewing every code every time I downloaded software updates from pseudonymous coders to wallet and mining software. Right now you can use the same software on both Ethereum and Eth Classic, but presumably that will not be the case in the future.



What happens to the price of ETHC when the DAO attacker cashes out his ETHC?

The DAO Attacker should be able to cash out a huge chunk of ETHC in the next few weeks.

ETHC has some ideological core supporters. But even they might get squeezed in the face of a large liquidation.



I might be wrong, but to me this poses a potential existential risk to the project.







The Long Term Matters

In the long run, ETH Classic does not have a development vision. Their plan is just to copy all of Ethereum’s innovations – and Ethereum’s innovations are necessary because Ethereum is still a very limited and unscalable technology!



Stuff like this is planned for Ethereum:

Given that Ethereum is a pretty mediocre technology right now, getting scalability is paramount.







Copying other people’s work is not a vision that will reap success long-term.

I didn’t much like how the fork happened, but to me the choice was clear which project to support: Ethereum, fork and all.











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A Scenario Where Ethereum Classic Could Overtake Ethereum

To Fork Or Note To Fork

