# What is happening with Ethereum Classic? by Bob Summerwill (Devcon5) - Speakers: Bob Summerwill - Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon) - Date: 2020-10-09 - Duration: 22:40 - Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, ethereum - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-CLjNItU3yXU - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLjNItU3yXU ## Description Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on IPFS and more. https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/5/what-is-happening-with-ethereum-classic 2019 has been an exciting year for the Ethereum Classic community. Three years on from The DAO the focus is on developer experience, on coordinating hard forks to bring Byzantium, Constantinople and Istanbul changes to ETC, and looking forward to opportunities for collaboration with ETH 1.x. This presentation gives an overview of the ETC ecosystem, progress in the last year and some ideas on how ETH 1.x and ETC can work together for mutual benefit. Bob has worked at the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and now at the Ethereum Classic Cooperative. Speaker(s): Bob Summerwill Skill level: Beginner Track: Execution layer Keywords: ETC, classic, technical Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/ Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. Devcon 5 was held in Osaka, Japan on Oct 8 - 11, 2019. Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/ ## Transcript so hi my name is Bob some oil I'm the executive director of the etherium classic cooperative I been in that position since January I previously worked at the foundation at consensus on the enterprise aetherium Alliance where I work for the set up of that and then I was the the co-lead architect during that set up and then I was the secretary of their technical working group and the vice chair of the the TSC and I've done stuff in in hyper lecture as well and and now I find myself in classic so I've just said a little bit about what what what's been happening we really have a a resurgence within classic right now where after several years of fairly inactive kind of status we've got forward movement again you know you had the you had the split at the dow fork there was the the monetary policy change and disabling of the bomb and then that was about what what had happened but what's changed is is really that we have funding now that with etc' labs we we have effectively unlike a joseph Lubin for classic so the way i describe things is very much like things were in in aetherium land in 2015 if you've got a good project idea you have some money you have some money you have some money so we're moving and the the most recent and big thing that we had was Atlantis so Atlantis was our first hard fork for quite a long time and and what happened there was that we we fought in Byzantium opcodes so classic is now not very far behind ETH so for Atlantis we had three clients with support that's multi goth which is a downstream of the foundation gap we had classic death which is a very ancient code base which was basically forged at the time of the Dow and then cobble along for a little bit further but is essentially in deprecation state so classic death is not going to make it to the next fork it's going to be a a happy retirement for classic death as we clap it clap it into retirement for its service but it's time is over parity has had support for both ET c and e th throughout so that's not a problem and and those are the the three code bases that we've had for atlantis the other primary code base that there is on classic is mantis which is from io HK now at the time that classic started charles Hoskinson returned into the classic side and and said that as a aetherium founder he helped you know felt a responsibility to support the the original vision that he felt that that really he should he should get involved and help out so he hired a community manager and he funded let's talk ECC podcast as well and also Kevin Lord has done social media and sort of outreach bits and pieces as well but they spent two years building a new code base in Scala which is one of the the turist they're implants that there is and apparently is also the lowest memory footprint and highest performance but nobody is really aware of it within the broader aetherium ecosystem because it's been a classic only client so nobody nobody knows about it work started on that codebase to add ETH support as well but that team essentially got source of defunded and slowed down and stopped as of December of last year really with Charles refocusing his efforts on kadhai know and really sort of half exiting the the classic ecosystem because of continual infighting and really feeling that he couldn't do the interesting things within classic but he wanted to you know he can he sort of said if if classic is just the litecoin of etherium who wants to do that anyway we recently had the etherium classic summit in vancouver my hometown of Vancouver and Charles close to the end only a few weeks to come finally agreed that he would come and speak so Charles had the the closing keynote and through the conference we we basically like romanced him back in a charmed in back in and and really what's gonna happen there is that you know that code base is going to be is gonna be revived so as we go into our forthcoming hard Forks mantis should be added into the set of of clients they're so classic death will be retired and you will have death and you will have parity and you will you will have mantas coming in as well but not just that you will also have hyper ledger Bisou now you may have heard of Bisou so BZ was previously called Pantheon and where that code base has come from is when I was involved with setting up the Enterprise a theory Malaya myself and Jehan were the co-lead architects and we did the the tech talk at the launch event at which I I said so sure hon is the distributed systems PhD and I'm the cheerleader so he basically then has spent the last two years back inside consensus building a new code base from scratch so that is permissively licensed patchy to it is written in Java and it is a theory main that compatible also supports cleek also supports system Istanbul BFT also supports privacy features and is also compliant with the EA specification so it's really like it's all of the stuff it's all of the good stuff and it's and it's really something that we've been striving for I think for about three years is to get to you know a very high quality code base in a language which is you know broadly used under that kind of Licensing and governance within the Linux Foundation which basically lets large enterprises come and engage because I think really what you want to have with aetherium clients is is something like you know Linux kernel kind of model that you know you start out well hey here's a project just for fun but then things get serious and and and and and basically enterprises start depending on that stuff and they start picking up the load you know so you see the Linux kernel you know the major contributors are you know they're they're big companies that that have a need for that because really what you want is is you want these big companies to be doing you know carrying the engineering load you know you can't have the get a team with four or five people carrying the weight of the world on their back forever like that just isn't going to work you need large professional teams and that's really what started with with Pantheon so what the classic cooperative is doing is is we are funding et Cie support in in baizhu and it's the very first thing that's happening within that code being within hi pleasure so very soon what you will have is a client which can run if they're in Maine that et Cie Maine that kotti Galli or any of these private scenarios so chain say for doing the work who did the work on classic to get that working for Atlantis now to work on hyper ledger code bases you don't have to be a hyper ledger member anyone can work on those but we love fly pledges that we joined Hydra Ledger as well we're applying to so hyper ledger for anyone that doesn't know is a collaboration project within the Linux Foundation which is an umbrella for a set of open-source blockchain technologies so hyper ledger fabric is the one that you hear about all the time that originally came from IBM the Sawtooth that originally came from Intel you have borrow which is an EVM but not main net compatible that was done by Mon acts you have Iroha and you also have hyper ledger in d which is a an identity piece the other thing that we've done is applied to join the enterprise of theorem Alliance and what why would we do that well the fact is that you've seen announced here at this conference the the main net initiative where the etherium foundation and the EEA are basically working together on spec'ing out use cases and you know protocol definitions for use of of the main net for enterprise scenarios so really the the specification work that you've had happening within the EA has primarily been about private or consortium chains when we started the EA the vision was that the main net and and you know basically private and public these the would converge and that's where we're getting to right now and what you'll what you'll see really with classic being involved as well is that the specifications really like the yellow paper if you look at the yellow paper the yellow paper assumes that you have one network in the world you know everything is F main that hard you know hard coded block numbers in the specification and I mean that's not that is not the way to do a specification of a technology stack of a protocol you should really have a modular setup that's like here is what an aetherium stack looks like appendix a here is the definition of an ethe main net here's the definition of an e.t.c main net here's the definition of a you know a private chain running a proof of authority so we're gonna help with that another thing that we've done recently is revived the old website we we had a maintenance issue one of the first things that my predecessor at the coop Anthony lucid II did was commissioned a Spanky new WordPress website but the problem with that is WordPress websites you only your admin can update it so we didn't really have a good means for the community to contribute changes back in the earlier web site that we had was was based on github and you could just do pull requests but you know it didn't look great so what we've done over the last little while is basically revived that old website but made it look nicer and updated the content and the guy who originally did the web design on that has just reappeared he actually attended the summit because he sees everything happening in classic and is like ooh as this is quite interesting I'm coming back so he can come back and help with a web site because he did it originally the other problem that we had is problems of of east-west communication specifically you know our Chinese community and and other Asian communities have been very disconnected with the West and for China specifically a primary reason for that is is is the Great Firewall so if you are in mainland China you can't access Twitter you can't access discord you can't access github and specifically the communication channels are a major problem because the discord and the Twitter that's where all of the communication happens so what I've done is well what's the answer well you use WeChat you use WeChat anywhere in the world so we now have etc' global comms channel which is just an open open WeChat channel where we've gathered all of the all of the community people from all of the sides and myself and Yaz and all of a sudden these these communication gaps barring time zones they're done everyone is very communicative if you can communicate so we're doing that the other thing that we're going to do is on that main website we are adding internationalization because we also have this this siloing thing of the etherium classic dog was English only and then other communities have built their own websites but then you know they don't have they're having to replicate well here's a tutorial about how we write a small contract and what is is classic and so on but by having that language support within that base website most countries maybe that's enough that you just point to a theory and classic dog and do the the drop down you know like normal websites like professional people can do but somehow we had not done so we're going to do that and I mean that's not to say well you have to only use the official website obviously anyone can do whatever they like on their own and add their own pieces but we should have that basic information available to everyone and one of the other things that we can have in there is blog posts so this site allows you to use simple markdown for blog posts we have been using medium medium again blocked by the firewall so the flow that we will have in stairs is blog post happening on that website that's accessible anywhere in the world probably in English first and then if you are flipping to one of the other language choices well you're gonna get it in English if there isn't a translation if there is you're gonna get it in your own language so that's a pattern which is not only breaching you know bridging east and west it's also bridging other communities Italian German French you know lots of these country specific ones that they're not necessarily developers you know that they are enthusiasts who can probably do a translation but you know they're there they're essentially receiving information you know they're not necessarily ever gonna be doing protocol changes or changes to clients but open open that stuff up the other piece that we have is that the is that the classic has signed a contract with Masari so Masari provide basically high-quality financial information on on particular coins and they're they're also showing developer activity you know where your repositories are you know how many how many what you what your transaction rates are and a lot of information about how the governance works what legal entities are involved how decisions are made what the issuance is and so on there hasn't been high-quality information on on classic and and something as simple as the fact that we've had sort of messed up repositories and things have been pointing at aetherium project where actually the work is happening in aetherium classic or in another area you get this false data saying hey there's no developer activity there's no being there's no no commits have happened and that's just wrong and and and but really having that public disclosure is something that's very important to me I've been maintaining this conflict of interests statement myself for two years now where I list essentially all of my financial arrangements all of my associations all of my historical salaries my crypto holdings my tax filings everything because I think that in a in a sea of scammers you distinguish yourself by being transparent so that's what we've been up to we've got pending changes you know I were basically I think going a fast follow Istanbul so within a few months et Cie is going to be caught up and you know moving between chains is going to be very trivial and beyond catching up we're actually going to have you know a few a few further changes so amazingly perhaps etc' is actually going to be objectively better than f1 within a few months which i think is going to blow people's minds gas prices will be lower the bloat will not be there the irregular state transaction will not be there and state channels work there's no need to blow at the l1 because we've got working state channels now and you know so I think in a few months time we're going to be in a in a really great place and people are going to be very surprised to say even if you don't have any ideological alignment it's just maybe a better deployment choice okay and there's my time up has anyone got any quick questions yep so Masari will have that information generally speaking I believe we've got a reasonable amount of transactions but they're primarily value transfers there is a dap ecosystem but it's weak and that really is because these foundational things have been missing you know when we're at that point of having those foundations i think we are going to get an awful lot of DAP developers supporting both moving over really because it's easy to do so and it's gonna be sort of cheaper and cheaper and better there's lots of things that are being doing to help that onboarding some of which terry announced earlier like like get coin swarm support with meta masks I think we can get meta masks really very soon with some of the changes that they announce so I think we can have a Moloch Dow for funding a whole range of things which you know really should be the story should be all of the tools that you love on aetherium same deal on classic so 51% attacks are possible on any chain that's the nature of proof of work something though that I think maybe people don't kind of clock is that 51% attacks are not necessarily disastrous to the network they attack single participants who have poor trust models Pacific's specifically usually exchanges you know in exchange who has received stuff and and you know release things without waiting a suitable amount of of confirmations if you have less hash power well you you really need to wait for a lot more confirms before proceeding I mean that's the source of stuff that only really generally effects you know large value transfers if you're just doing little state changes of you know Dappy stuff you know just don't wait a lot of confirms anyway I mean I guess it's like well you know a bus pass or whatever it is money it's not hard money but that's fine you know not everything has to be rock-hard money so I think you know the answer is that you you you are gonna have that security at the bottom layer and you know you get less and less as you as you go higher up and really the thing that is going to get that security is having more hash power and that will happen as the developers come over as more and more activities happening that attracts the hash that gets you the security and there is no other answer than that really for for powa that's the nature of it so we have to get the activity when we get the activity we'll get the we'll get the hash and we'll get the security thank you [Applause]