The Ethereum Classic Attacker Has Sent a Bigger Message

They belong to a minority community of ethereum users, developers and miners who in 2016 decided to keep working on the old blockchain that was left when leading developers in the ethereum community convinced a majority of users to run a new software that would reverse the transactions of the notorious DAO hacker.

Whether you called it theft or not, the ethereum blockchain should be immutable, they would say.

Ethereum, on the other hand, which represents the forked version of the blockchain that the majority moved to after The DAO, has, for now at least, remained free from a 51-percent attack.

This is not to say that ethereum is immune from such risks in the future.

Still, the numbers point to a much more secure foundation at ethereum than ethereum classic.

According to Crypto51, which tracks the estimated cost of launching such an attack on different proof-of-work blockchains, it would cost $88,633 to launch a one-hour attack on ethereum, as opposed to just $4,571 for ethereum classic.

Ethereum is second only to bitcoin's $281,060 on that list as the most expensive to hit with a 51-percent attack.

For all these interrelated reasons, ethereum's comparatively large global community of enthusiastic users make it a more secure blockchain than ethereum classic.

A history of immutability, if that's what ethereum classic truly represented, was of lesser importance from a security perspective than the strength of the competing ethereum chain's community.

This is borne out in CoinDesk's Crypto-Economics Explorer, whose five metrics of value - price, exchange transactions, social activity, developer interest and network size - all show markedly higher levels for ethereum than ethereum classic.