The breath-taking story of Ethereum is going on. Some folk tweet in their twitters they have ditched Game of Thrones for the sake of the much more exciting show around the Ethereum blockchain.
The tale begins when somebody found a vulnerability in the smart contract of The DAO and withdrew over 50% of its ethers to a child DAO. Due to the design of the contract, the offender could not make use of the ethers straight away. Because The DAO accumulated over 14% of all ethers in circulation, which is a big amount and can be used to attack the network, for example, after Ethereum switched to the PoS algorithm, the Ethereum Foundation published a letter proposing to implement a soft fork first, that is, a change in the code that does not require all nodes to be updated, in order to freeze the funds withdrawn, and then a hard fork, that is, changes in the code that require every network user to update client software, in order to transfer all ethers to a contract that would return all funds to investors.
The Ethereum community had to face many of those who did not approve the change in the code, because, as they believe, it would undermine the credibility of the network based on the immutability of its protocol. As a result, after a social consensus reached, they agreed on a soft fork and nearly implemented it, when, just a few hours before it happened, a vulnerability was discovered in its code and the soft fork was dumped. Finally, the hard fork took place, that is, 85% of miners chose a new network where all The Dao ethers were returned to original owners.
But the story did not end here: the old network carried on supported by Poloniex, the crypto exchange with the largest ether trade volume, and the original unchanged network entered the exchange, and all ether holders got Classic ether with the exception if The DAO investors. As of now, the volume of Ethereum Classic has exceeded that of Ethereum, its capitalisation reached $271 mln at the highest point, and many miners seeing the benefit in Ethereum Classic switched back to the old network.
The bottom line is: we have two networks and the proof that networks are very enduring and can hardly be destroyed, or rather, it would be to no economic benefit. Personally, I pledge my complete support to ETH, because it has an economy of applications that use ether and, more important, the team of developers. What Ethereum Classic has is the idea of an inviolable code, miners who only think about profits, and speculators. For the moment it is hugely overpriced, but the situation may change and the system gets its own developers.
I like this decentralised Ethereum world, it is open and you can make your own choice, and who wants to work in the original network, they have this opportunity, but it would be a different project.
And for me, there will always be one Ethereum created by a unique team, which keeps making it better every day!
______________________________________________
I write my analytics especially for Steemit.com and BlockchainBoom.