Analysis: Bitmain’s clear support for ETC’s revival brings hope and difficulties

At the Miami Mining Conference, Bitmain's AntPool said it has invested $10 million to support the Ethereum Classic ecosystem and plans to continue investing more. The initial $10 million investment will be used for application development and exploration of the Ethereum Classic mainnet to improve the overall performance of the network. Bitmain will also accept ETC payments for all of its Antminer models. Previously, the industry had reported that Bitmain founder Zhan Ketuan was interested in supporting Ethereum Classic.

Recently, due to the upcoming merger of Ethereum (tentatively scheduled for September according to the developer), ETC Ethereum Classic, known as the "Doomsday Chariot", has indeed begun to surge. The reason for the rise is largely due to the belief that ETC can take over the computing power, some users and even the ecosystem after the merger of Ethereum. Bitmain and Core Motion are the main manufacturers of Ethereum ASIC mining machines. The latter has transformed into a traditional GPU. Therefore, for the sake of its own mining machines, Bitmain must also support ETC.

As Ethereum Classic ETC, which chose not to roll back after Ethereum was hacked, has always had many big-name supporters. From the earliest Chinese strong capital DFG to the crypto-first group DCG that holds Grayscale, CoinDesk, Genesis, and Foundry, it has only earned the name of "Doomsday Chariot". What is the reason? Can Bitmain's support be successful? The author of this article communicated with many ecological people and summarized as follows:

1. In the past, ETC was supported and promoted by DFG and DCG in China and the United States respectively, but it did not stir up much waves in the end, and there were even some conflicts. Whether they will continue to strongly support after the merger is still unknown. DCG currently has to deal with big problems such as Grayscale and Genesis, and whether it still has the energy to support ETC has not yet been revealed. DFG is unlikely to do so.

2. The ETC developer team is very scattered, without a spiritual leader like Vitalik or a centralized force, so pushing things forward will be relatively slow and inefficient. Currently, almost no mature Ethereum projects have entered the ETC ecosystem. If a mature protocol enters in the future, it will be a relatively important step, and it will also drive the participation of other projects.

3. Large miners and mining machine manufacturers are currently the most active in promoting the power of the ETC ecosystem. It is rumored that nearly $5 billion worth of mining equipment has been idle after the Ethereum merger. However, because the mining industry is completely different from the public chain ecosystem, miners do not have the ability to build a public chain ecosystem. BCH, which Bitmain supported with all its wealth during its heyday, can hardly be said to be successful. It may just be a test to support ETC with a small amount of $10 million.

Another problem is that if any of the top miners’ computing power enters ETC, it may immediately cause a 51% computing power concentration attack risk. Therefore, it is also possible that after the launch of the Filecoin mainnet, miners will each launch a forked chain to control the disk.

Currently, Bao Erye has created a group to discuss the issue, but the opinions vary greatly. For example, veteran miner Xingkong said why Ethereum should be forked instead of supporting other public chains that use POW or graphics card mining (including Kadena Starcoin Aleo CKB Conflux, etc.). However, due to the low ability of miners to build public chains and ecosystems, the probability of success is low.

Summary: Miners are the most eager to participate in the construction of the ETC ecosystem because they obviously do not want to abandon their machines. They have funds, but they do not have the experience and ability to build a public chain ecosystem. They are more likely to fork their own controllable POW ETH. ETC developers are relatively decentralized, and it is difficult to actively and efficiently organize and coordinate the forces of all parties. However, ETC is still the best place to undertake ETH POW users/community/funds. The key is whether the existing ETH mature protocol and the organizers with driving force like CZ SBF will enter the market. However, SBF seems to have expressed no interest in POW/mining machine factories. Whether Binance can intervene may be a more important key.