What will happen after ETC activates the Thanos hard fork?

According to ETCNodes data, the ETC mainnet reached block height 11700000 at 03:48 on November 29, and the Thanos hard fork upgrade has been activated. The upgrade was deployed through the Thanos (ECIP-1099) protocol and restored the mining rights of 3GB and 4GB GPU miners.

On November 28, ETC rose in the short term, breaking through $6.4, with a daily increase of 7.82%. After the hard fork, ETC fell below the $6.3 mark, with a daily decline of 2.08%.

Previously, Xu Kang, head of the ETC 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 blocks to 60,000 blocks, effectively reducing the size of the DAG. This modified Ethash is also known as 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. However, 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 rapidly adjusting to the Ethereum 2.0 process. Earlier this month, the ETC Cooperative released its third quarter transparency report for 2020. It announced personnel changes, attack times, upgrades, etc. Among them, it is worth noting that ETC suffered three 51% attacks in one month and all infrastructure has now switched to Besu (Ethercluster, BlockScout, all full nodes and Boot nodes).

Because ETC has suffered multiple 51% attacks, this has a great impact on mining pools and users. Currently, graphics cards are the main force in ETC mining, and nearly 40% of the computing power comes from machines with less than 4G video memory. Combined with the previous congestion of the ETH network, the revenue increased dramatically, resulting in a significant drop in ETC computing power. Before this upgrade, the community discussed many solutions, and the core was naturally to stabilize the basic computing power.

The ECIP-1099 proposal directly doubles the DAG size adjustment cycle from the original 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 community-proposed solution to fix the DAG size was not adopted. It will take about a month for ETH's DAG to reach 4G. By then, there will be a lot of graphics card computing power that has not upgraded the video memory and ASIC computing power that does not support more than 4G video memory that will need to find suitable currencies for mining. ETC computing power should usher in a big increase, and existing miners need to pay more attention to this trend of the entire network.

From the overall route of ETC, ETC is seeking its own innovation. Previously, Ethereum Classic clearly tweeted that ETC no longer follows the roadmap under Vitalik's vision and aims to learn from ETH1. It is time for ETC to bring some meaningful innovations to the Ethereum Classic network.

Xu Kang, head of ETC Asia Pacific, also said that fundamentally, ETC and ETH share the same underlying layer and some of the same infrastructure. Therefore, the development direction of some technologies should be consistent. ETC has done three hard fork upgrades since last year. These three hard fork upgrades are compatible with Ethereum technology to a large extent. In terms of functions and features, as long as Ethereum can achieve some functions and features, ETC can also achieve them.

Obviously, ETC hopes that the applications growing on Ethereum can make use of the process of Ethereum migrating to 2.0, and POW believers can complete some attempts on the ETC chain.

This can also be seen from wETC that ETC labs is working on. wETC is an attempt by ETC to expand Defi, but the development potential is still the market trend. Although mining and trading markets are related, they are essentially separated. Mining can be done as long as there is income, and liquidity is king in finance. Moreover, whether DeFi on Ethereum can drive the enrichment of ETC-like assets, this process still needs to be waited for. What ETC needs now is a stable mining ecosystem, and then look at the enrichment of assets on the network.