Ethereum hard fork

It’s now clear to all that the infamous ETH fork is a complete mess (and kudos to Bitcoin developer for making their point to not move forward with contentious hard forks).

At therocktrading.com we made a clear choice to handle just one ‘Ethereum’ chain: as I explained before, we are small and could not afford to follow, maintain, handle transactions and give support on yet another chain, even if we would have loved to. ETH seemed the dominant chain after the fork and so we stayed with that, even if our heart were towards ETC.

After a few days, it has become clear that ETC has its support, even if it is still way behind ETH in terms of hash rate, developers, companies supporting it and so on … This led to a couple of our users to ask for “their” ETC balances at TheRock (after the fork), and way way more non therock users to ask to “refund” ETC balances to our users.

I disagree that we “must refund” ETC balances: when you deposit something to an exchange, it’s no more your money; you are trusting the exchange which gives you IOUs basically of what you deposited. From a purely legal point of view, we are almost free to run away with your money.

Don’t worry, we haven’t done so since we were born as a virtual company in Second Life almost 10 years ago, we won’t run away with “your” money now or in the future. Therefore, we will give ETC to those users who held an ETH balance prefork at therock and will ask for them (providing information on where to send them). Just be patient that we will handle each request manually.

In the end, thanks to the people who miss-handled this fork, we were forced to do what we were trying to avoid: maintaining two chains. For us, it led to a big loss (think about hw resources and above all human resources used to take care of this), but for the community, it was a much bigger loss.

Article written by Davide Barbieri, Chief Technical Officer at The Rock Trading