Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st

Let me get this out of the way: While I admire the contributions by the Ethereum Foundation and wish them all the best, I think the hard fork shouldn't have been done. I think letting the money get away would show that they actually mean the 'code is law' statement that was thrown around (Note that I have till date never owned ETH or ETC and probably won't in the near future)

Now that that's out the way, let me say the cognitive dissonance in that post is palpable. Words are conveniently placed so spin the situation into something else.

r/Bitcoin is shown to be the culprit here, just because they are the ones with the most subs and poking fun at ETH. The reality was every other altcoin community was doing the exact same thing. I was watching everything closely when as it unfolded. I can link you posts from other subreddits if you want.

>The Ethereum community stuck together, worked together, and fought back. Successfully

This is false. Quite a few of the ETH community fought for not forking. No one wants to lose money, so who wouldn't want to fork. Many vocal people invested quite a bit of their funds so it is completely understandable.

The irony here is, even the 'rogue hackers' were probably part of the ETH community. Who else would know the codebase so well? The phrase 'stuck together' is false.

>Barry Silberts co-owned exchange "Poloniex" raced to be the first exchange to start trading the coin of this old chain (ETC)

Looks like something a smart person would do. I would also capitalize on trades that people will make with ETC. You've immediately got twice the volume therefore double the fees that can be collected. This is clearly a good business decision. Doing that before other exchanges means more fees collected!

>ETC is an Attack against Ethereum

That's a bold claim. I don't see any 'attack'. Any person with half a brain can see which one is the original ETH. It is a fork, so calling it an attack is dramatic.

>It's a technological attack, and a monetary scam

Big words. I don't see any technology being used to attack ETH. Just people mining the coin they support.

>If you have bought, or holding, or still planning to buy ETC, be ready to get hit by some nasty surprises down the road ( on those days - and I can already foresee a few - I will be linking everyone back to this thread right here, as a reminder).

Now who sounds like they are spreading FUD?

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While Poloniex was made out to be the perpetrator, it has only 5% of the 24hr transaction volume. So pointing fingers at the Poloniex person was baseless and foolish.

I believe in a bright future for ETH and will probably get into it, but falsifying events is a great way to show others that the community can't self-police and is an echo chamber.

Err, each layer on top of IP slows down traffic, not speeds it up. The extra overhead and retransmits result in less useful data being transferred with each packet.

Perhaps not the best example to use.

Understanding a UASF requires understanding where hashrate comes from. Bitcoin is very clever in that hashrate costs money, and not just a little money, it costs a lot of money.

Which chain has more work is approximately saying 'which chain destroyed the most value in electricity'. The proof of work powering bitcoin costs hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Nobody burns hundreds of millions per year for free. They do it because you receive Bitcoins as payment, and then you can go sell those Bitcoins to pay your electricity and hardware bills.

That means you have to be able to find someone willing to buy them. A UASF is a bunch of users saying 'we'll never buy your coins unless you follow our fork'. If only a few users say this, it's no big deal, and the miners can decide to listen to them, or they can decide not to bother.

But if 2/3rds of the userbase all agree to enforce the UASF, the miners suddenly are going to have a lot of trouble selling their non-UASF coins. Enough trouble that they probably can't pay their electricity bills. Even worse for the miners, the UASF chain has a high block reward, so they know that if they do mine the UASF chain, they actually will be able to pay their bills. And if a competing miner does it, that competing miner will have much higher margins, higher profits, and will be able to out-invest you when it comes to buying more hashrate.

Scariest of all, if the UASF chain ends up with more work than the non-UASF chain, the non-UASF chain gets completely obliterated, and its full transaction history is reversed, and all the blocks you mined as a miner are destroyed. So even if the UASF doesn't seem to have majority support, it's really bad for you as a miner and as a user if it ever eventually does gain majority support. So when the UASF has a lot of traction, really the safest move is to join the UASF, because at least then your coins aren't at risk of being eliminated entirely.

> I don't think trying to process transactions on both chains would be the right move.

Why is that? Wouldn't this be the most profitable approach for an exchange?