The original chain has to be forked either way, with or without eip 1559 because the "ice age" coded into the current version (it's in there for this exact reason). So if the change goes through and some miners decide to block it, there's not going to be an "original chain" and a "fork", but two forks, one supported by devs and minority of miners, and one supported by miner majority.
Why should this threat of violence be treated differently than the act itself? Miners are threatening to do the one thing their entire existence is supposed to prevent. They're cutting off their noses to spite their faces, instead of enjoying another year or so of profitability
If something like this isn’t possible and you don’t actually need consensus to push through changes then the whole “distributed” part is just a fiction and we’re really talking about a centrally controlled network. Miners are just basically threatening to vote against the EIP if it comes to it.
Threatening to vote against a bill if it reaches the floor in its current form isn’t an attack or violence. It’s just a message that if you want it to pass you should probably change it.
You don't need a miner majority to do fork the chain, both versions (with and without fork) will exist and whichever is most valued by users/the market tends to "win" and bring miners back in because they like money.
Unlike your voting on a bill analogy, the reality of blockchains is that both universes can co-exist.
A better comparison would be that a billionaire decided to take over just because he had more cash.
Sounds like an attack to me.
DAO: Code is law, code is law, trust the code over any natural language document that describes our smartcontracts.
"Hacker": Okay, if the smartcontract says that, then it follows that I'm entitled to these ETH if I do this...
DAO: What? No! That's not fair! That's not what we meant! Oh, come on, do-over!
ETH Classic: No? That defeats the entire purpose of Ethereum, for code to be law.
DAO: Not when it comes at the cost of significant wealth for the core team!
That said, the current NFT craze is idiotic. As you point out, there's lots of people trying to try external value to a blockchain using what is more or less nothing more than a "super pinky promise". And that's supremely stupid. Today's valuable blockchains have value by themselves. Linking blockchains to external properties, assets, certificates or capabilities is still an ongoing problem. Only after the identity problem is solved and standardized will NFTs linked to external things be worth anything.
They also seem well suited for being able to transfer ownership of physical goods and also transfer things like warranties. With an NFT tied to a serial number, you could ensure only one owner with that serial numbers item can claim warranty coverage, ensure resellers don’t try and pass off something used as new, ensure stolen goods can be tracked as such, etc.
It's a given that at some point this will be tested in a court, with favorable results.
As long as one person keeps running the old software, the old chain is alive.
Even if nobody does it, somebody could start running it again at any time.
The different chains will have different market caps. And the general public will forget about chains that have sufficiently small market caps.
I wonder what will happen to Ether that is in custody. Like in the Greyscale Ethereum Trust or the 21Shares Ethereum ETP.
Has anybody ever checked the TOS of these companies on what will happen if multiple forks carry significant value?
Wouldn’t it make sense for miners to switch to a new Ethereum chain without the bomb?
This scenario is definitely possible, but it requires a little more work than "one guy keeps running an old eth1 node".
who will take this chain seriously
If it has 51% of Ethereum’s current hashpower, somebody. (Ethereum Proof of Stake is the same number of forks away from Ethereum Classic.)
How is it defined? Like somebody releases a new version with the bomb removed. Most miners adapt it. Why is it then a fork? Because the bomb is a major feature? Otherwise, wouldn't ever software upgrade be considered a fork?
Unfortunately not a single resource I found actually describes this process in an easy to understand fashion - pretty amazing considering we are talking about $200+ billion dollars....
It would be a bit messy.
However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining rig, you would like to do something with your hardware.
You would like to profit from your hardware*.
That's an important distinction, as what make you profit from your hardware, isn't running it on ETH in particular, it's running it on a cryptocurrency which is used. They could run it on ETC currently if they want to keep mining, but they don't as ETH represents more value. So whether they keep running on the fork is more about whether the cash will be there to mine on it and my impression is that it won't be there.
Currently there's quite a big smear campaign on the environment impact of cryptocurrency on the world. This is important for many people, thus will impact whatever they decide to do.
There was also always a preference toward the forks supported by the official developers. It's normal, as long as we have no reason to doubt their decisions, why change? In this case this is even more true as it's not questioning the decision, the intention is clear that it's about the miner hardware.
Let not forget also that this fork will be supported by peoples that proved that they could orchestrate a 51% attack for their own gains... which is pretty much the fear that was always there on cryptocurrencies...
There's no reason to believe people would go toward a fork, thus there won't be much value in mining on that fork versus any alternative cryptocurrency. If I was a miner, I would start selling my graphic cards... they are still sold for quite a bit of money currently and it's just a matter of time before the price crash and it become easy again to buy a new graphic card.
The owners of the coins, the developers, the miners?
Actually I would argue it would be the exchanges: What the major exchanges choose to trade as Ethereum is what will continue.
Ultimately society/the market decides which version is worth more.
I see how that is possible. Anybody can probably burn ETH they own by sending it to an invalid address or something.
And how was it created on the beacon chain? Was it simiply hard programmed into the software "We start with a bunch of ether at the following address: ..."?
Do you know where it is described?
https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/staking/
https://launchpad.ethereum.org/overview/
Picking any active validator on the Beacon Chain, we can see that there is an Eth1 deposit and a corresponding Eth2 deposit:
https://beaconcha.in/validator/91676#deposits
https://beaconscan.com/validator/91676#deposits
If you're interested in the technical details, see:
https://github.com/ethereum/eth2.0-specs/tree/dev/specs/phas...
Could you elaborate?
1. Staking in Cardano does not lock up your funds, and is really decentralized, getting more every day. Because of that, more than 70% of all coins are currently staked. This brings less volatility to the price and ensure longevity of the chain. The interest is not too big too, everything seems as sustainable as it can be.
2. Cardano supports assets natively instead of having them just being backed by smart contracts (this is/will be still possible though), which means that there are no extra gas fees to send/receive stablecoins or assets other than Ada.
3. Babel fees are part of 2, it means that the transaction fees can be paid by native tokens, not only ada. This is a huge improvement from the BSC or Eth, where you need BNB/ETH to pay transaction fees even if you're only dealing in stablecoins.
4. Smart contracts are finally coming in Q2, which will bring DeFi to Cardano (this explains the price mooning in late feb, early march, because of the mary hardfork).
5. Forks and updates in the chain are painless, last one I didn't even had to send money to a new wallet or anything like that.
6. New developments and features to the chain and ecosystem are being "baked into the protocol", in a sense. Project Catalyst is the first step for this, financing some projects, but in their roadmap they plan on giving away all control of the direction of the coin, and only work as a service provider to the ecosystem using the same infrastructure as all the other projects.
I'm really bullish on this coin, not only on price but also on the kinds of problems it can solve. Can answer more questions if you have any :)
First, they need to keep the miners happy until the second before they are turned off.
Second, "escalating" the deployment of code seems like an always bad idea for such a massive system.