Ethereum developers hope that the old chain will continue to exist, and Ethereum's chances of success will increase

Zsolt Felföldi is an Ethereum developer working on the Go implementation of the Ethereum protocol, sometimes called Geth.

In this article, Felföldi discusses the emergence of a competing blockchain project, Ethereum Classic, and why he believes that project should continue given the impact of its blockchain operations on social consensus.

A blockchain is more than just a bunch of data created by miners and users.

It’s also more than just a specification describing valid state transitions and a genesis block describing the initial state. What really makes a blockchain valuable is its human consensus, a widely held belief that it’s useful to create machine consensus based on certain rules.

In addition to a fully specified genesis block, there are many ideas associated with the blockchain that are born at the same time. Each user can have their own idea of ​​why this chain is valuable and how much value it has.

Unfortunately, one person’s assumptions can be mistakenly viewed as general consensus. These incorrect assumptions may not be discovered until an event occurs, such as a disagreement on what should be done and whether a forked chain is more valuable than the original chain.

At this point, it’s too late to discuss core values ​​and reach consensus. The damage has been done. Where interests once aligned, they now conflict. Everyone has biases, and everyone can assume others do, too. We once believed in the “social contract” but suddenly realize it doesn’t (or at least some people are breaking it as we understand it, and we are breaking it as they understand it).

Of course, a united community with only one chain would be better, but we can’t do that because we have different core values. Even within the Ethereum Foundation, the core values ​​are not the same. It was a huge mistake not to have a clear “social contract of the blockchain” at the time of the genesis block.

By the way, I also had a false assumption, and to be honest I was quite shocked when I found out that some people within the Ethereum Foundation actually supported the idea of ​​hard fork intervention.

I used to think we all thought there was no more ‘just’ outcome than enforcing the EVM, that the ‘stolen’ money was the legitimate property of the ‘thief’, and that he or she should be proud of creating a system that would protect his or her property, even if it led to public outrage. I was definitely not the only one on the Go development team who thought this.

It turns out we were wrong, and people decided that a sense of justice was more important than immutability. I'm a little sad about that, but it's still a dream to be paid to develop the coolest software technology ever, even if (at least for now) most people don't think so. I don't call these people stupid. I don't think they're arrogant. I also don't think they're right just because they're the majority.

That is not the case. I intend to keep my eyes open and follow events closely to learn as much as I can from current events.

What I've realized so far is that a blockchain without an explicit social contract is going to have serious problems sooner or later. Interestingly, today, the old 'classic' chain has a much better contract. The contract has not been changed, but offloading most of its value to a new chain changes its implicit contract.

We can assume that whoever found the old chain valuable would see no reason to fork due to unconscious smart contract behavior. The old chain will never face another crisis due to a similar event. On the other hand, the new chain's ether holders may still not agree that this hard fork is a precedent for all similar events, or that this fork is just a one-time disaster fix and will never be hard forked again.

I am not saying that forked chains are inevitable. What I am saying is that there is still a lack of a strategy for dealing with such an event.

Until the next major surprise happens, we may still have time to figure out and reach a consensus on what should be done in this situation. That way, they can decide what can and cannot happen to the chain they are entrusting their funds to. In any case, I urge everyone to calm down and not be hostile to people in the other camp, because what is happening now hurts the Ethereum project and both chains.

Everyone has the right and even a moral obligation to follow their own set of values, and it should be easy to deal with this in a civilized manner.

The old chain may or may not survive. I think the main reason it survives is that it will be a very interesting and important experiment to see how two similar chains with different underlying protocols evolve.

It might even increase the project’s overall chances of success (if you split your ether between two chains, you might not lose all your funds in the next crisis).

But let's be clear, we (Ethereum developers) have never abandoned the old chain. We have never forked this chain. I implemented a switch in the client that allows users to choose whether to fork or not. That 'Ethereum Classic' chain is as much our child as the forked chain, and if they both survive (which will be up to the users, not us), then I will treat them equally in the future.