When Ethereum's developers activated the hard fork to reverse the DAO hack, the community celebrated the decision. Vitalik Buterin opened champagne. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, tweeted about the
When Ethereum's developers activated the hard fork to reverse the DAO hack, the community celebrated the decision. Vitalik Buterin opened champagne. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, tweeted about the merits of hard forks as an upgrade mechanism. But a small group in the ecosystem disagreed. They wanted to preserve what they saw as Ethereum's core principle: unstoppable code. Wiz, a self-described crypto-anarchist and former managing director of WizSec, belonged to this group.
On July 21, Wiz sent me a message. He was pleased the hard fork had worked. He included a block explorer screenshot showing his ranking: he was among the top 25 miners on Ethereum. I had expected the fork to create two separate chains. Instead, the original chain lost support at first.
"I guess what we learned is that you just need to get the top five pools onboard and you're good," Wiz told me. Those five pools controlled more than 90 percent of Ethereum's hashrate. He questioned whether Ethereum was essentially centralized among ten people. "I guess if I grew my pool by 5x size, I could get in the top ten and at least have a voice," he said. "But [I'd] still overwhelmingly be outvoted."
The exchanges made the situation worse. They wouldn't list the original chain, which people were calling ETHC at the time. Without a price on major exchanges, the coins had no value. The chain only existed on Bitsquare (now called Bisq) and in a bitcointalk.org thread. Aaron van Wirdum at Bitcoin Magazine had recently published an interview with someone described as the project's coordinator, so I decided to wait before writing my own story.
Hours later, Wiz messaged again: "Guess who now represents 20% of the hash power on Ethereum Classic?"
"I'm solving blocks like crazy right now," he added. (ETC was what people would start calling ETHC.)
By the next day, Wiz controlled 40 percent of the network's hashrate. "I think I solved 31 blocks in a row or something crazy," he said. The reason was clear: the only other major mining pool on Ethereum Classic had gone offline, leaving Wiz alone for about ten minutes. As the day continued, the hashrate kept dropping. Wiz considered switching his equipment back to the forked chain.
"At this point I'm like the only one mining the chain except for the [Ethereum Classic] founders," he said. We talked about whether a story made sense now. "Let's see if it gets any traction. I mean, if exchanges start trading it, then this could potentially be a thing," he said.
Two hours later, Poloniex began trading Ethereum Classic.
An hour after Poloniex's listing, Wiz controlled about a third of the hashrate, though new miners were joining and the rate was climbing. Wiz estimated the network's total power based on his own hashrate and how often he was solving blocks. "I think true network hash power is around 30GH/s," he said.
By then, his mining had paid off: "Hmm, I just realized I have more than $20K worth of ETC. Like, out of nowhere." At its peak, those coins were worth around $90,000.
As speculation in ETC continued over the next hours and days, more miners arrived and Wiz's share shrank. Around midnight, Wiz explained what had happened: "It's now very clear what has happened to Ethereum. Originally, about 20% of the network opposed the DAO fork, but because of consensus rules, everyone was afraid and went along with the majority thinking the non-fork chain would be abandoned (and it was, for about 2-3 days). Now the people realize that both chains can peacefully co-exist, and since they already have ETC, they immediately value it at 20% of the worth of ETH."
By the time I finished writing, Ethereum Classic traded at about 5 percent of the forked chain's price and hashrate. Wiz sent a final thought: "I am literally eating popcorn right now. This is so fun to watch."
