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Ethereum Classic (ETC) recently saw a successful implementation of the Thanos hard fork. The move was made just a few days ago, on November 29th. Interestingly, the hard fork was followed by a significant increase in the ETC blockchain hashrate.
Thanos’ hardfork was a major move for Ethereum Classic, as it increased the project’s network security. After the ETC hack earlier this year, the new hard fork was intended to increase the project’s hashrate, thus making it 51% less vulnerable to attack. Apparently, the fork has achieved its goal.
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The project’s hashrate rose from 3.3 terahash per second (TH / s) to 5.75 TH / s in a few hours after the crossroads.
Why was the Thanos rigid fork needed?
As some may know, the Ethereum Classic blockchain uses DAG (Direct Acyclic Graph), which was introduced to prevent the centralization of hash power. With some professional miners using ASICs instead of CPU and GPU miners, there was a major hash power centralization problem, where these miners would dominate the blockchain, leaving no room for those who cannot afford equipment worth thousands. dollars.
The developers say the strategy was a great success, but it had some downsides. For example, the DAG parameters were overly aggressive, which eventually made even GPU miners obsolete.
This is why the Thanos fork was necessary, as the developers had planned to reduce the DAG file size from 3.95GB to 2.47GB. This way, the ASIC miners would still be out of the game, while the GPU miners would be able to get back to the network.
The fork had another proposal, which is to extend ETC’s mining period twice as much, in order to purchase GPU miners at least another three years.
The fork was finally implemented in early November 29, after the blockchain reached 11,700,000 blocks. More than 90% of the miners in the project migrated and the hashrate increased significantly in the following hours.
