Special Announcement: ETC switching to Proof of Authority
After hours of careful research and a sizable donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it has become clear that Ethereum Classic's commitment to Proof of Work is not only a danger to the environment and society at large, but with recent advances in the blockchain ecosystem, is shown to be an outdated technology that is overshadowed by far more easy to capture efficient consensus mechanisms.
It was identified that in order to adhere to Ethereum Classic's long-running commitment to decentralization, rather than switching to Proof of Stake, which is extremely complex and has a high potential for failure, the more conservative, battle-tested and decentralized alternative known as Proof of Authority was selected.
The Ethereum Classic's Research and Development department have discovered that Proof of Authority is more decentralized in practice than Proof of Stake because in PoA block producers are known to the public and can be held accountable, and these authorities are not incentivized to manipulate the economics of the network as they are not rewarded through staking. Proof of Authority, in addition, does not suffer from the "rich get richer" problem in Proof of Stake, as well as many of the other downsides introduced by the immense complexity of staking protocols.
Upon this understanding, much discussion has taken place in the ETC community about the next steps forward. Consensus about the switch to PoA has been reached via a coin vote, which the CEO of ETC completed last night with a group of his mates, proving that 85% of the community support this decision.
Authorities will receive no direct monetary compensation for performing their role, but they will be basically able to decide the outcome of all future forks and have the ability to confiscate anyone's ETC. It was determined this will not be a problem because they have pinky-promised not to do this.
A highly credible and trustworthy set of validator authorities has been selected to help safeguard the security of Ethereum Classic, and by extension, the future of humanity.
- Klaus Schwab, CEO of the World Economic Forum
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
- Ben Bernake, former Chair of the Federal Reserve
- Craig Wright aka. Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin
- Stefan Tual, former CCO of Ethereum Foundation
The block 133,769,420 has been selected for the upcoming fork, which is expected to arrive at approximately 10:32 UTC on 1st April 2098.
Please stay tuned for further updates, and join the discord to find out more.