Dear Ethereum Classic stakeholder,
The Ethereum Classic network will be undergoing the Thanos hard-fork this week, at block 11_700_000 or around November 29, 2020.
Major ETC pools making up the majority of the hash rate have confirmed their support for Thanos as well as major block explorers and infrastructure providers. Exchanges, wallets, and other services are preparing or ready. As we track the progress of the fork, please signal to an ETC organization or the community that you're ready for Tha
Thanos is a hard-fork which will reduce the size and the growth rate of the DAG file. The Thanos hard-fork is specified in ECIP-1099 a proposal that increased the long term viability of GPU mining on ETC.
At current epoch (372) the DAG size is 3.91 GB. 4GB GPUs are getting obsoleted while they still make up a significant amount of ethash hashrate. Activating this change at epoch 376 (for example), would reduce the DAG size from 3.94GB to 2.47GB. With the reduced growth rate, 4GB GPUs will remain supported for an additional 3+ years.
Thanos aims at providing a breathing room to developers fighting against "double-spend" attacks. While we know adding potentially more hash rate from lower memory GPU cards adds to the supply technically available to attack ETC, its been shown that because Ethash and the newly known mining algorithm "EtcHash" NiceHash has dropped ETC from its markets. Slowly but surely things are getting better.
Hard fork required for activation. Mining software and pool implementations required.further work.
Besu, Core-geth, and Mantis will be supporting the Thanos hard-fork. Miner users should use Core-geth because Besu and Mantis mining is not mature enough for mainnet mining yet.
Ethereum Classic will now be using the Etchash algorithm for the mining of its crypto currency. As such, from miners, to mining software developers, and user iners need to update their mining software to an Etchash .
EtcHash resources:
