The Future of ETC

The future of ETC runs on three parallel threads: the ECIP discussion process, the Mantis client, and community consensus.

The joint statement from the ETC Cooperative and ETC Labs claiming there is no information and the ECIP status is unknown is false, given IOG's repeated public Wednesday timeline.

Dexaran claims IOHK will not follow the ECIP process, even though writing an ECIP is the process itself, amid a fresh wave of personal attacks he expected upon ETC's return.

Two ECIPs, one for treasury and one for checkpointing, will run through an open, uncensored process with dedicated GitHub repos alongside the official ECIP repo.

PirlGuard is one competing proposal he is open to evaluating even without knowing the product well, since an open ECIP process exists for education, iteration, and competition, not a Discord troll storm.

Reaching broad consensus on any solution will likely take one to two months, and publishing a rigid mandate or testnet timeline before that conversation happens is irresponsible.

Borrowing consensus from an external system changes who controls ETC and its social contract, which cuts against code is law, lex lata.

The Mantis client team is racing to catch up on development with a stretch goal of November, and weekly unedited development update livestreams will restart in September.

People once watched Mantis get built from scratch over a year and a half into a client that worked with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic alike, and IOHK also built a React based wallet called Luna for it.

The third thread is community consensus itself, with the ECIP process meant to educate people on borrowing consensus short term versus the utility ETC needs for 2021 and beyond.

Voting with your client is option one: switching to Mantis would include the deployed ECIPs, and a supermajority switch would fork off the minority chain.

Option two is a weaker straw man vote, expressing support or opposition through hash power or stake without switching clients.

Option three, the contentious one, is proof of burn: destroying a token on one chain to redeem it one to one on another, a protocol IOHK already built and tested on the ETC and Bitcoin testnets.

A minority chain that survived a burn split would likely die off quickly or live on as a small simulacrum that keeps the ETC name and brand.

Changing the consensus algorithm to borrow external security like OBFT nodes or ProgPoW is not a minor 51 percent attack fix, it fundamentally changes who controls the system, as shown by the ASIC resistant versus ASIC friendly tradeoff and his own year long wait for a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin ASIC that arrived worthless.

The real point of the treasury conversation is not the money, it is the roadmap: what ETC will actually do, who gets funded, and keeping funded teams free of special interests.

Just as F# will never disagree with Microsoft, a team paid by one company will default to that company's interests over the community's whenever the two diverge, a pattern seen across open source projects captured by rich benefactors.

This ECIP round is the most significant in ETC's history, and none of the unpaid work, including the Mantis updates, supports claims that this is an IOG cash grab: a fair three way treasury split would only net ETC two to three million dollars a year against roughly one and a half million in costs, versus the ten million dollars he just put into a new Cardano investment fund alone.

IOG came back to ETC asking for a real conversation about the treasury and offering to write ECIPs, but got no dialogue in return; instead, the very next day, the ETC Cooperative and ETC Labs told CoinTelegraph the ecosystem was against IOG's plans, a lie, since there is no real leadership, only self-appointed leaders, and opposition formed before any proposal was even presented.

He can absorb personal criticism, but not people claiming to speak for the community's best interests when they clearly do not; he wants ETC to be secure and permanent infrastructure, its independent voices empowered free of fear for their jobs or revenue, and its own roadmap solving real problems instead of copy-pasting Ethereum.

IOG bowed out rather than force the issue, instead financing Let's Talk ETC, community managers, and social channels, and spending over a million and a half dollars building the Mantis client plus conference advocacy; when the ETCDEV aligned community chose no treasury funding, IOG walked away to let the ecosystem prove its own independence, security, and sustainability.

Years later, on the back of repeated 51 percent attacks, the same custodians are making dramatic changes while again asking everyone to trust them, still without answering how ETC differentiates from Ethereum after its pivot to Ethereum 2.0, or where new developers and utility will come from.

Bitcoin, despite being slow, has stronger values from being tested the longest and is now gaining smart contracts, making it one of the biggest coming competitors, while ETC still has not said why anyone should choose it over five hundred other chains.

Before any real conversation could happen, ETC Labs and the Cooperative tried to shut it down, scheduling a filtering meeting at five or six in the morning where no voting was allowed, then issuing a joint statement claiming nothing had been proposed despite the announced science paper, demo video, and ECIP timeline.

As a large company, IOG can absorb these political hits, but the silent community members who fear speaking out about stolen GitHub repos and past grievances cannot, which is why this new third pillar of direct community voice exists alongside the ECIP process and the Mantis client.

IOG could easily build a voting contract given its money and expertise, but instead recommends adopting the Mantis client because it is purpose built and security audited for ETC rather than a cosmetically modified fork, and if differences prove irreconcilable, proof of burn remains an option since it conserves total token supply rather than creating new tokens.

What he wants is a real conversation, not duplicity, double speak, backhanded media statements, or meetings scheduled at inconvenient hours; every great cryptocurrency needs security, sustainability, and independence or it does not deserve to exist, and with five hundred or more alternatives there is no reason to stay with the unstable, toxic option.

From Wednesday, new ECIPs will include work on getting these ideas compatible with Geth and other clients, with IOG teams available to help implement them, and Mantis itself will ship this year; people can vote by switching to Mantis or staying put, and a Mantis supermajority would itself signal the community's choice.

He is happy to discuss consensus changes like SHA-3, ProgPoW, or RandomX, or other external consensus systems, as long as proponents do not later claim they are being silenced, and as long as fundamental questions like opt-in versus opt-out and reversibility are settled first.

IOG will submit its ECIPs to both the official ECIP repo and separate IOHK repos so the community gets a fair, transparent hearing on all sides.

Regardless of how checkpointing turns out, the community should still get to decide who receives any ETC treasury funding, even if that means picking a different team than IOG, as long as the result still delivers security, sustainability, and independence.

What is happening right now delivers none of those three goalposts: no one has a real voice, dissent gets attacked and silenced, and there is no real security given the repeated 51 percent attacks and delisting risk; after four years of doing it their way, it is time to try a different way.