Recovery - Showing signs of life

ETC community declares its independence [1] in August 2016.

Let it be known to the entire world that on July 20th, 2016, at block 1,920,000, we as a community of sovereign individuals stood united by a common vision to continue the original Ethereum blockchain that is truly free from censorship, fraud or third party interference. In realizing that the blockchain represents absolute truth, we stand by it, supporting its immutability and its future. We do not make this declaration lightly, nor without forethought to the consequences of our actions.

A lot of volunteers continue to support the now called Ethereum Classic chain despite the chain going through very rough times. On February 20th 2017, Igor Artamonov founds a company called ETCDEV whose focus is on improving developer tools for Ethereum Classic Smart Contract developers and contributing to the go-ethereum classic client. The team consists of some of the volunteers that were already helping the ETC community. Similarly, Charles Hoskinson who had worked for Ethereum in the past, hires a team of 7 developers [1] from Poland to start writing a completely new Ethereum Classic client from scratch. The team is known as Team Grothendieck named after a French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. In an interview with Crypto Baron, he explains his view on the DAO hard fork.

Changes to the Ethereum Classic protocol

Ethereum Classic community decides to implement a Monetary Policy similar to that of Bitcoin. It was proposed by Matthew ‘snaproll’ Mazur in ECIP-1017

This ECIP proposes a solution to the Ethereum Classic Monetary Policy to adjust, with finality, the current emission schedule implementation of 14.0625ETC per block in perpetuity. The solution proposed introduces a theoretical upper bound on the maximum absolute number of ETC and introduces a method of degraded emission over time.

The total amount of ETC in circulation will be going towards 230 million but doing it increasingly slower due to block reward reductions that are scheduled in advance. The first block reduction happened at block 5000000 which was mined in March 2017. You can check when the next block reduction will happen on a website that has a countdown to it.

Another important change that was done was disabling the difficulty bomb. Difficulty bomb was a piece of code in Ethereum clients that was put in the client by Ethereum Foundation with the intention to force them to work and implement a Proof of Stake solution and complete it in time. Essentially what it does is that after some time, it starts making mining increasingly difficult. Why would you force yourself to follow your roadmap by putting bombs in your schedule is still a mistery to me. ETC community decided to first delay the difficulty bomb because the community was not convinced whether it was good to rush with a Proof of Stake consensus. Later it turned out majority thought the current implementations of Proof of Stake algorithms are not secure enough and that ETC will stay on Proof of Work until the community agrees to switch over - if they switch over. Instead of delaying the difficulty bomb again, another ECIP came in to remove the difficulty bomb altogether which was accepted and later implemented.

As Ethereum Classic Mainnet is not planed to migrate to PoS in near future there is no reason to have it and the Difficulty Bomb should be removed to avoid collapse of the network.

Positive events start happening

A stream of positive events starts happening in the early half a year. Just to name a few:

A new podcast is started called Let’s talk ETC
Grayscale announces Ethereum Classic Investment Trust
A group of volunteers donates to a Phoenix project that gives us style guideliness, a new ETC logo and the phoenix mascot
Whatisgravity comes back for a short period of time to announce he has been working on a project [1] for Ethereum Classic
First ETC Summit is announced and said to be held in Hong Kong
A bunch of exchanges start listing ETC

Ethereum Classic community started to recover from the initial social attacks that happened mostly due to many articles falsely reporting on the DAO hack without really having any understanding of it.