Ethereum classic is the latest digital currency to fall victim of 51% attacks which left its security to question. There has been a serious discussion going on among the Ethereum classic core developers, ChainSafe Systems, Byzantine Fault and IOHK to develop an Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP).
In a recent discussion, the team proposed to include the rough roadmap introduced by Charles Hoskinson from IOHK. In regard with this, IOHK’s engineers team will be presenting a demo of their ‘Checkpointing’ solution by creating a mock 51% attack at Thursday’s meeting.
Strengthening Proof-of-Work Security
One of the biggest risks for a blockchain using Proof-of-Work consensus is the 51% attacks when a subject controls more than half of mining power of the network, one can effectively reorganise the blockchain at their preference. Checkpointing has been proposed to protect against these 51% attacks. Checkpointing acts as an assisting service to Proof-of-Work by engaging an external set of parties to run on it which guarantees the ledger’s properties and can be relied upon during the times when invested hash power is low.
The team plans to use timestamping as an assisting service along with checkpointing by building a fully decentralised timestamping solution. For now, they will showcase the liveness guarantees of the mechanism by evaluating the checkpointed version of Ethereum Classic.
The team believed that the checkpointing with Pirlguard will act as a short term solution to protect the network against reorganizations as with the current provided hashrates the network can be reorganized at any time. And the good thing about the IOHK recommendation is that resources which are directed towards working on ETC do not take away from ADA as they are a separate team.
Ethereum Classic on its way to explore more solutions
Since the attacks, a lot of things are happening in the Ethereum Classic and currently they are working on a blog post about how to switch over to Besu from OpenEthereum or MultiGeth.It will be a walkthrough to show and guide node operators. They expressed that there are too many important topics and proposals which could use more input and feedback.
Apart from these short term solutions, Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP) also included a long term solution for developing an Ethereum Classic Treasury System.
Under this, they aim to establish a decentralized funding mechanism for the development and maintenance of the Ethereum Classic platform. ETC’s implementation will increase stability and the outlook of the system, providing additional benefits for both stakeholders and miners.
