In order to fight against Bitmain, ETN hard fork killed itself

On the afternoon of May 30, ETN (Electroneum) conducted a hard fork after the 307,499th block was produced. After that, the computing power dropped sharply and returned to zero a few hours later.

In the eyes of industry insiders, this was a fork that started out to fight against the "mining tyrant" Bitmain, but it failed to estimate its own strength and ended up accidentally.

In March, several digital currencies including XMR (Monero) and SC (Cloud Storage Coin) resisted using the Asic mining machines developed by Bitmain for their algorithms, and modified their algorithms one after another, triggering a wave of forks.

Its essence is a community defense war launched to prevent computing power from becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of mining machine manufacturers.

The ETN fork is the continuation of this wave of community defense war. According to the ETN official website, the team leading the ETN fork is from the UK. It was originally a forked coin of BCN. The team was established in July 2017 and released the ETN wallet in December. This wallet has been well received in the industry.

Since 4:00 pm on May 30, the hash rate of ETN has been displayed as 0 after the fork. The industry commented that ETN's fork "killed itself for the sake of decentralization."

The Death of Forked Coins

This fork accident, which was called "weird" by the industry, originated from the Monero hard fork on the afternoon of April 6 this year.

The algorithm of ETN is the same as that of Monero, both of which use the CN algorithm. In the mining circle, mining small currencies often makes more profit than mining mainstream currencies, so Bitmain will develop Asic mining machines for small currencies with large trading volumes.

Antminer X3 was launched by Bitmain at the beginning of this year for digital currencies such as Monero and ETN.

On April 6, Monero suddenly modified its original algorithm and performed a hard fork.

This caused a large number of Antminer X3s that were originally used to mine Monero to become unusable. Later facts proved that they had all transferred their mining machines to ETN, DCY and Bytecoin mining pools that mined the same algorithm.

On a mining machine forum, ETN miners found that two weeks after the Monero fork, Masari's computing power increased by more than 20 times, Dero increased by 7 times, and ETN increased by 3-4 times.

At that time they were still communicating in the forum, and the ETN team had not yet proposed a hard fork, right?

Shortly after that, the CoinIn mining pool received news that ETN would also modify its algorithm and would perform a hard fork at an altitude of 307,500 on May 30.

After the fork, Asic mining machines will not be able to be used for ETN mining, and 6-card graphics cards will be used for mining instead.

The calculation rules have also changed. The rule after the fork is to calculate the block difficulty of the first 360 blocks in real time and adjust it to maintain a block every two minutes. For example, if the current block time is greater than two minutes, the difficulty will be reduced, and if it is less than two minutes, the difficulty will be increased.

Zhu Yu, founder of CoinIn Mining Pool, told ShenChain Finance that because most of ETN's computing power comes from Asic mining machines, after the fork, ETN's total network computing power will immediately drop due to the withdrawal of Asic mining machines.

The CoinIn mining pool conservatively estimates that its computing power may immediately drop to 0.2% of the original computing power of the entire network.

“This means that it will take 500 times longer to produce the next block,” Zhu said.

However, six hours after the fork, ETN only produced one block. Its network-wide computing power chart shows that the computing power began to drop precipitously at 2 p.m. on May 30, and by 4 p.m., the computing power had almost dropped to 0. From 5 p.m. to date, the computing power has remained at 0.

A block came out nearly 7 hours after the fork, but there has been no second block since then.

"The block that came out after the fork might be the one that some miners didn't have time to withdraw from," Zhu Yu said.

As of yesterday afternoon, the transaction volume accumulated on the ETN block exceeded 9M, but after the fork, one ETN block only had more than 100K.

“It means that if you send a transaction now, you may never receive it.” Many industry insiders analyzed the current situation of ETN and believed that it is beyond saving and is likely to die.

Rebellion against Bitmain

DeepChain Finance’s investigation found that the reason for ETN’s fork originated from the community’s battle to defend Monero.

Earlier this year, Bitmain developed the Antminer X3 for Monero, which is known as the Monero miner in the industry. In the words of industry insiders, the computing power of this miner is amazing.

For example, after the Antminer X3 was launched, from January 10 to February 10 this year, within a month, the price of Monero plummeted, but the computing power rose against the trend. Some miners calculated that the computing power of the entire network increased by 300MH, an increase of nearly 40%. Such a large increase can be achieved with only hundreds of X3s.

At that time, the official account of Bitmain also released this mining machine on Twitter. Unexpectedly, Riccardo Spagni, the founder of Monero, immediately retweeted it and announced under this tweet that Monero would change the POW algorithm.

Industry insiders told DeepChain Finance that Riccardo Spagni did this because he noticed the powerful computing power of Bitmain's mining machines.

They fear that one day in the future, more than 51% of the computing power will be concentrated in the hands of Bitmain, so in the Monero community, there are more and more discussions about decentralization, and some miners even directly propose to fight against Bitmain and defend Monero.

Riccardo Spagni obviously stood with this group of miners. Monero completed a hard fork within a few months. After the fork, miners could use graphics cards to mine.

Some miners noticed that Bitmain’s official Twitter account subsequently blocked Riccardo Spagni, the founder of Monero. Because Bitmain spends at least five months on design, R&D, trial production, and integrated chip mass production for a mining machine, the hard fork of Monero means that these mining machines are useless.

Miners who bought the Antminer X3 are panicking. On a mining machine forum, a mining machine custodian summarized other digital currencies that can be mined with the Antminer X3, including ETN.

I thought the matter would be settled there, but the panic surrounding "whether computing power will become increasingly concentrated in the hands of Bitmain" is still spreading.

Industry insiders told Deepchain Finance that SC also had a hard fork later, which was also caused by this. The same is true for ETN.

DeepChain Finance has not yet contacted the ETN team, but after checking the ETN computing power table, it was found that its total network computing power did increase dramatically after the Monero hard fork.

"Can refusing to use Bitmain's Asic mining machines eliminate the risk of centralization? Obviously not." On May 31, Zhu Yu told DeepChain Finance.

He also said that although the CoinIn mining pool has an ETN mining pool, they have not contacted the ETN project party.

Zhu Yu has done some calculations and found that after the fork, if there were 1,000 6-card graphics cards, the network's computing power would be 0.2% of the original. However, the team that led the fork obviously did not expect that all the miners would withdraw.

Miner, rat in the bellows

In this war between the currency community and Bitmain, there is another injured group - miners.

When buying the Antminer X3, miners expect to recoup their investment if they can mine stably within two to three months.

However, the anti-centralized team that led the hard fork was playing a game with Bitmain, which made profits from mining machines, and no one cared about their desire to recoup their investment.

After the Monero fork, some mining machine custodians posted on the miners' forum, calling on everyone to find new coins suitable for mining with Antminer X3.

ETN was the choice of most miners because the currency price was relatively good at the time.

But just one month later, ETN also chose to fork in order to resist the "mining tyrants".

One day after the ETN hard fork, a miner found the CoinIn mining pool and told about his experience of forking from Monero and transferring ETN. He didn't care about centralization or decentralization, as a miner, his only demand was to mine and get income.

After the ETN hard fork, he looked a little anxious and asked the CoinIn mining pool if they could help them find coins that could be mined with this mining machine.

But the answer I got was that there are no plans for the time being.

"The other currencies that can be mined with this mining machine are all smaller currencies, and their codes are unreliable, one worse than the other," said Zhu Yu.

He also felt helpless when faced with these miners who were eliminated for mining with mining machines.

Someone asked at the scene, no matter what, "It can be regarded as practicing the spirit of decentralization, right?"

Zhu Yu laughed and said that the word “practice” was not used properly. Practicing an idea generally means doing something relatively successful. However, after the ETN hard fork, the computing power became 0. “They also killed themselves.