ETC ECIP Meetings Next Week

Both the 51 percent attack resistance ECIP and the treasury ECIP go to the Ethereum Classic ECIP repo, mirrored on IOHK's own GitHub since IOHK is not part of ETC's process and does not want the drafts censored.

The 51 percent attack ECIP has a typo or two since its author's first language isn't English, but the underlying technology is solid, already tested on Mantis, and fully solves the attack, with some trade-offs still to be discussed.

The treasury ECIP includes a description of a proto-treasury system plus roughly 700 lines of Solidity as a working reference contract people can install and try today.

A four stage ECIP process precedes consensus: understandability, practicality, philosophy and comparison, with both new ECIPs currently sitting at the understandability stage.

Next week's public, recorded meetings, one per ECIP, pair a roughly 30 minute presentation with moderated Q&A that is explicitly not a debate about whose idea is better or how it stacks up against VeriBlock or PirlGuard.

Mantis already implements the 51 percent attack fix for the practicality stage, and IOHK will write implementation docs for the remaining clients and send them to their core developers to get a rough estimate, a week, a month, or three months, of the work involved.

The same understandability and practicality process should apply to every competing proposal: Tim and Kevin Lord are the likely moderators, VeriBlock's Justin Fisher already wants to do this, and PirlGuard's team would be welcome to as well.

Recalls that ETC Labs branded everything he was saying a violation of ETC's values before IOHK had even written a proposal down on paper.

A federated 51 percent attack fix means ETC is no longer a pure proof of work system, which changes who is in control, and Donald McIntyre gets credit for at least writing his own account of ETC's values, despite frequent disagreement, in dialogue that stays productive because it puts everyone on equal footing.

Warns that adoption of a technically sound proposal still depends on which teams choose to implement it, recalling that ETC Dev would not even entertain the 51 percent attack conversation back in 2017, and says the process ultimately comes down to users voting with their client software.

Predicts that by November ETC will have at least a testnet, and quite possibly a mainnet, version of Mantis carrying the 51 percent attack fix and the hard fork code that starts populating the treasury, since the treasury contract itself can be submitted regardless of whether the community agrees.

ETC holders face a choice between sticking with old, seldom updated clients copied from other projects or adopting Mantis, a security audited client built from the ground up, with a two thirds Mantis adoption threshold before pushing the hard fork and a fallback burn contract that would split off a new ecosystem and leave a dead chain behind.

A collaborative process with VeriBlock and other proposal teams beats a fight, since real deliberation cannot happen on Discord, Twitter, Telegram or Reddit and instead needs a structured, respectful setting where each team gets the spotlight to make its case.

A potential treasury roadmap centers on Prism, a new proof of work protocol out of Stanford, MIT, UIUC and CMU that is implemented in Rust, claims to be 10,000 times faster than Bitcoin and 100 times faster than Ethereum, and has already replayed 10 years of network history in a few weeks.

Further roadmap items include moving off the stock EVM to the Jello Paper semantics and KEVM, building out the Firefly framework for formal verification tooling, replacing Merkle Patricia tries with encoded Merkle trees, and possibly switching the consensus algorithm to SHA-3 or RandomX.

A treasury funded ETC would mean constant progress, innovation and open disagreement, against what he calls four plus years of copy paste code, no dApp or token growth, and no voice for anyone who disagrees with the small group controlling the funds.

Claims formal semantics and formal testing frameworks give ETC a shot at something legitimately novel that even Ethereum 2 won't have for a while, achievable as soon as 2021 with three independent client teams each bringing their own flair to the ecosystem.

Mantis earned its credibility the hard way: IOHK spent a year and a half building an Ethereum and Ethereum Classic compatible client from scratch in Scala, unlike ETC Dev, which forked Geth or Parity instead.

Appeals directly to ETC holders and miners who still believe in the ecosystem to vote with their client, and says the upcoming Mantis release ships with a full GUI wallet he calls the best client ever built for ETC.

Refuses to join meetings pre-set up to censor people after being burned twice, criticizing critics who went to CoinTelegraph and CoinDesk claiming to speak for the whole community, and Medium posts calling the ECIPs' status unknown even though they shipped on the promised Wednesday.

Warns that dApp developers and token issuers have no patience or emotional attachment to ETC and will simply leave for Polkadot, Tezos, EOS, Ethereum, Ethereum 2 or Cardano if treated the way critics have treated IOHK's proposals.

The path forward starts with next week's understandability meetings, expected to be moderated by Tim and Kevin Lord, ending in a vote by downloading whichever client fits your values.

The two thirds threshold and burn contract fallback stand as his final resolve: either the process converges on a good decision, the community splits, or the ideas simply do not get adopted in ETC, but he can leave the ecosystem having given holders a genuine choice that today's leadership vacuum denies them.

The MIT Sloan paper What Problem Are You Trying to Solve, by Todd Astor, Michael Morales, Don Kieffer and Nelson Repenning, is required reading in his view; IOHK uses its problem structuring techniques for Cardano's Voltaire voting framework too, and he closes by urging structured dialogue over Discord drama, Medium posts, or going to journalists.