The unintended consequences of the ethereum hard fork, and the growing interest among users in having two competing ethereum networks, continued to mount this week as new problems became apparent due to the ongoing popularity of the alternative network.
A week ago, there was one ethereum , a decentralized computing platform that’s drawn outside attention for applying the cryptocurrency concept to develop new Internet applications. But due to a schism in how people think the platform should work, there are now two ethereum networks , ethereum and ethereum classic, both of which use an almost identical history.
The thinking was one blockchain ‘winner’ would quickly emerge, and the other would eventually fall to the wayside. Both, however, have continued to exist despite these predictions.
At issue is that, by creating two separate networks, with two separate blockchains, anyone who held funds in the first iteration (ethereum) is now the owner of funds on the second (ethereum classic). Complicating matters is that, for users, both their ETH funds on ethereum, and ETC funds on ethereum classic, have the same address and private keys.
The present conditions have set the stage for "replay attacks", which in computer science terms simply means that a network action that is repeated that isn’t supposed to be. In digital currency terms, when someone broadcasts a transaction using one of the networks, in many cases, that transaction gets included in both blockchains, as well.
This means users who try to buy ETH today won’t be affected, but anyone who had funds in any contract prior to the fork was essentially duplicated on the other fork.
Ethereum developer Zsolt Felföldi, who works on the platform’s Go implementation, explained that this shouldn’t happen if both networks were taking proper precautions.
"Separating these two networks was never really planned," he said.Given the attention paid to ethereum […]
