Many Ethereum users from all around the world thought that the Ethereum classic drama would end once the hard fork was issued to recover the lost DAO funds, yet this hasn’t happened. In fact, the process did shine some light on one of the biggest threats of cryptocurrency- the need to have consensus, and the inability of the community to achieve it.
To put things better into perspective, whenever a fork happens on the digital currency market, it is important for the community to carefully choose between two main branches, and then proceed to move from the one which lost, to the one which won. This helps keep balance, and ensures a higher rate of success for the digital currency in question.
During the initial Ethereum hard fork debates, there were legitimate arguments coming from both sides of the spectrum. Some believed that as they did not invest into The DAO, they had no reason to rescue its backers, whereas many others were affected by the hack and wanted to get their funds back.
However, it can safely be assumed that the fork was messy and that the digital currency community may wish to stay away from future forks for this very reason. This is so mostly due to the fact that the fork set a good precedent for both bitcoin and Ethereum. While future forks will surely be needed for implementing essential changes, the community is one step closer to understanding that opposing change is not ideal.
The main idea that needs to be understood by the community is that when urgent situations that require a fork to be solved occur, the community needs to debate, listen and then proceed to settle on a majority chain as quick as possible. In this manner, both soft and hard forks can be implemented with ease, and after all, no one truly wants to issue transactions alone on a separated blockchain.
As the hard Ethereum fork resulted in the appearance of Ethereum Classic, economic analysts have tried their best to make presumptions on what the future of this digital currency is. According to them, it’s likely that ETC will bounce between 5% and 30% of ETH’s price, and then proceed to fade over the next 4-6 months, especially as more projects will be built on the ETH chain, rather than the ETC one.
Based on everything that has been outlined so far, what do you personally think about the hard/soft fork debate, and about the repercussions of the Ethereum fork? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.