ETC briefly made it to the top ten coins recently, turning the leaderboard into three bitcoins and two eths for a few hours.

The copy clone of ethereum, however, can just be merged into ethereum 2.0 as a new shard just like eth’s current Proof of Work (PoW) chain will be merged.

“Technically very possible!” – Vitalik Buterin, ethereum’s co-founder, publicly said before further adding:

“You can just use the same merger process to import the ETC state that is planned for ETH, and then the ETC execution environment code would enforce a different exchange rate vs beacon chain eth, based on the rate at the time of the merger (or some other pre-agreed formula). This is if you want to re-merge the currencies.”

ETC was promoted back in 2016 by Barry Silbert, the Blockstream backer and Coindesk owner, but the bear market made many of its devs throw in the towel due to little interest now four years on.

Some other devs are however picking up the mantle with ETC trying to position itself as the conservative option and potentially as the exit option if one is disgruntled with eth.

Yet its future is unclear because back in 2016 there were hardly any dapps and ETC hasn’t quite kept up with the booming innovation in eth in the defi area and much else.

As such, once eth transitions to full Proof of Stake (PoS), the current Proof of Work chain might be kept running for whatever reason, so potentially making ETC obsolete as arguably its only “reasonable” long term value proposition is the continued maintenance of PoW.

With the current eth PoW, the “soon” eth PoS, arguably having another eth etc is maybe a bit too much. So ETC holders might like it very much if it is merged because according to Buterin they’d get eth on the PoS chain proportional to the value of one ETC.

Say for simplicity ETC is $10 while eth is $100, they’d get 0.1 eth. In addition their entire ecosystem would be ported, making it an acquisition of sorts.

“Whether or not the communities want it is of course another question,” Buterin says, with eth holders being the ones that answer it as it’s their chain.

On the plus side, you potentially get rid of this coin, although maybe not as it might just continue anyway for whatever reason.

If it doesn’t keep running, then potentially any value that might have gone to ETC maybe goes to eth.

On the downside, you’d be “printing” quite a lot of eth (circa 5% of supply) to accommodate the etcetras.

That would probably make it quite controversial, but you don’t necessarily have to pay them. ETH could just copy clone their blockchain and give them nothing since their blockchain is open source of course.

Presumably eth could in the same way perhaps copy even tron, eos, cardano once it goes out with smart contracts, or any blockchain.

That’s by using whatever dapps are on these networks as the skeleton for a new shard, instead of starting off as a blanket slate.

However, whether that’s worth it is a good question because they don’t really have any dapps that stand out, so you’d probably be copying mostly casinos. Making it a bit pointless.

Yet the pointfull is that the secondary blockchain is always at risk of being eaten up by the primary chain either by it being merged, copied, or in the bitcoin instance by just increasing the blocksize or capacity.

That’s not to even mention the technical aspects of hashpower sharing which makes the secondary chain insecure. Something ETC knows well as it was 51% attacked last year.

Update: At the request of Brandon Jones, who says he works with the Digital Currency Group, “ETC was created back in 2016 by Barry Silbert” has been changed to promoted. Jones says:

“Barry was not involved in the creation of ETC. ETC was the left-over fork that came out of the hard fork that reversed a series of transactions related to the DAO hack. ETC is the fork that didn’t have the transactions reversed.”

Ethereum has had plenty of hardforks and only the ETC chain was maintained. As far as we are aware, the initial ETC dev team was funded by Silbert or Silbert related companies.

It’s not very clear who the first miners were or who funded them, but Silbert played a key role in the brief rise and long slow fall of ETC.

However, “created” is maybe stretching it a bit too much, so the article has been corrected.

Copyrights Trustnodes.com