ETH POS is just not going to convince supporters of decentralization. The biggest validators will soon be the centralized exchanges and institutions we know today while the validators are also going to be forced by regulators like SEC to track transactions and probably even freeze funds thru these CEXs.
I agree and would say that's a strong possibility as we already see staking today taking place on the exchanges. With the price of ETH high not many people have the ability to solo stake. It seems centralized to me and open to government influence. But I have thought that since I sold most of my ETH at $50
... ETC is for POW miners who are really die-hard mining it. So why would they choose to migrate now instead of starting it first? They probably want to stay with ETH mainchain because it's the main one.
Many with 5GB memory chips will stay with ETH until the end because it is the most profitable coin to mine. Few miners would leave 41% higher returns on the table, unless forced to do so as happened with the recent DAG increase. Many have sunk thousands into mining hardware and will seek ROI, which now takes years ...
Owners of GPU miners will still have to make a choice and connect their machines to another network.
It ain't just GPU miners on Ethereum. They have purpose built ASICs going from $1000 to $30000. This one is $27k:
https://ipollo.com/products/ipollo-v/But can't feel too bad as they make the choice to buy it. Mining is full of overpriced equipment and unexperienced people do not know to take into account difficulty increase. But people with this equipment will seek ROI and really only have ETC as an alternative. This will move up hash rate by force instead of it following price. It will be tricky for miners and could end up being another Dash situation (where you need to pay $0.01 per kW/h to make $0.10 per day with the best equipment).
With Ethereum Classic, it is similar to Dogecoin. It is truly to say there are more developments for Ethereum Classic than Dogecoin that nearly has no development.
That makes me think that both are driven by community and actually decent because they are not a scam. Many of the ERC series tokens are designed to make a dev team or individual wealthy. DOGE had massive returns and became a meme coin after being "dead" for 8 years or more. I wonder if the same could happen with ETC.
My biggest issue with ETC was when the 51% attack occurred. But that seems less likely now. And looking at the ECIP (Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposals) list, there seems to actually be a lot of devs working on the core software:
https://ecips.ethereumclassic.org/core. But there aren't the front end developments like DeFi and such.
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It seems to have some strong fundamental potential for attention and price rise. Instead of buying and ERC20 token, paying $70 to "bridge" to a new network via an unknown and unregulated third party website, like
zapper.fi, it seems like a path of lower resistance to use the same programming language on the other Virtual Ethereum Machine. It'd certainly be easier for those less technically inclined. And it has the scarcity component of
only 210,700,000 to exist, instead of ETH with a max supply of ∞
