According to data from ETCNodes, the ETC mainnet reached a block height of 11700000 at 03:48 on November 29, and the Thanos hard fork upgrade has been activated. This upgrade was deployed through the Thanos (ECIP-1099) protocol, restoring the mining permissions of 3GB and 4GB GPU miners.
On November 28, ETC rose short-term, breaking through US$6.4, and the intraday increase reached 7.82%. After the hard fork, ETC fell below the US$6.3 mark, and the intraday drop reached 2.08%.
Previously, Xu Kang, head of ETC’s Asia-Pacific community, said that fundamentally, this upgrade did not change the algorithm. This upgrade decided to double the duration of the Ethash epoch from 30,000 to 60,000, effectively reducing the size of the DAG. This modified Ethash is also called EtcHash. This will allow miners with 3GB and 4GB GPU systems to resume mining, increase security and promote a more decentralized and healthy mining ecosystem. But from the perspective of the mining process, each manufacturer still needs to make some adjustments to the mining machine, and mining is still subject to the manufacturer.
ETC is making rapid adjustments while Ethereum is facing the 2.0 process. Earlier this month, ETC Cooperative released a transparency report for the third quarter of 2020. Among them, personnel changes, attack time, and upgrade work were announced. What needs attention is that ETC suffered three 51% attacks in a month and all infrastructure has now been switched to Besu (Ethercluster, BlockScout, all full nodes and Boot nodes).
Because ETC has encountered multiple 51% attacks, this has a great impact on mining pools and users. At present, graphics cards are the main force of ETC mining, and nearly 40% of the computing power comes from machines with less than 4G memory. The congestion of the ETH network before the superimposition caused a sharp increase in revenue, resulting in a sharp drop in ETC computing power. Before this upgrade, the community discussed a lot of options, and the core is naturally a stable computing power base disk.
The ECIP-1099 program directly doubles the adjustment period of the DAG size from 30,000 to 60,000. Therefore, after the upgrade, the video memory required for mining ETC will drop significantly to more than 2G. Of course, it will continue to grow every year, and it will take several years to reach 4G again. The previous proposal of a fixed DAG size proposed by the community has not been adopted. ETH’s DAG has reached 4G in about a month, and there will be many graphics cards that have not upgraded the graphics memory and ASICs that do not support more than 4G. You need to find a suitable currency for mining. ETC computing power should usher in a great growth. For existing miners, they need to pay more attention to this trend of the entire network.
From the perspective of ETC’s overall route, ETC is seeking its own innovation. Earlier, Ethereum Classic clearly tweeted that ETC no longer follows the roadmap under the Vitalik vision and aims to learn ETH1. It’s time for ETC to bring some meaningful innovations to the Ethereum Classic network.
Xu Kang, the head of ETC Asia Pacific, also said that, fundamentally, ETC and ETH share the same underlying and the same infrastructure. Therefore, the development direction of some technologies should be consistent. ETC has made three hard fork upgrades since last year. These three hard fork upgrades are largely compatible with Ethereum’s technology. In terms of functions and characteristics, ETC can also achieve some functions and characteristics that can be achieved.
Obviously, ETC hopes that in the process of migrating to 2.0 with the help of Ethereum for applications grown on Ethereum, POW believers can complete some attempts on the ETC chain.
This can also be seen from the wETC that ETC labs is doing. WETC is an attempt by ETC to expand Defi, but the development potential is still market-oriented. Although mining and trading markets are connected, they are essentially separated. Mining is possible, and finance is the king of liquidity. What’s more, whether defi on Ethereum can drive the enrichment of ETC assets, this process still has to wait. ETC now first needs a stable mining ecology, and then Look at the enrichment of assets on the Internet.
