Donald McIntyre, one of the most active coordinators for matters related to the ongoing development of Ethereum Classic (ETC), a Turing Complete and proof-of-work (PoW)-based platform for building decentralized applications (dApps), has published a blog post which recaps a discussion that took place among the platform’s developers.

As mentioned in McIntyre’s post, “part of the ETC ecosystem held a call” in order to discuss a proposed hard fork (backwards incompatible upgrade), called Atlantis, which has been outlined in Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposal (ECIP) 1054.

ETC Core Developers’ Main Topics Of Discussion

Some of the main suggested changes to the Ethereum Classic network that were considered during the call include:

  • “Spurious Dragon state-trie clearing,”
  • “Spurious Dragon contract-code size limit,”
  • Addition of several “Byzantium Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) opcodes,”
  • “Byzantium EVM precompiled contracts” including those involving “addition and scalar multiplication” for calculating certain ETC-related functions, and other calculation methods involving “modular exponentiation,”
  • Changes to how ETC transaction receipts are processed,
  • Modifying ETC’s difficulty adjustment algorithm to “target mean block time”

A few main topics discussed during the call are as follows:

  • “ETC core developers have specified the six changes in the Atlantis hard fork” which is now open for discussion to the wider Ethereum Classic community.
  • Suggestions were made to “perform the hard fork on block 8,750,000” on ETC’s mainnet.
  • Zac Mitton, an ETC developer, recommended “analyzing the risk/reward ratio that state trie clearing (item 1 above) may represent as it does not affect ETH compatibility, and the benefits in reducing the state size seem to be marginal as compared to some risks when relating those changes to other ECIPs. There [also appears] to be some buggy code risk in the specification of that change.”
  • Majority of the ETC developers who were present during the call agreed, for the most part, to have “a quantifiable benefit of the state trie clearing, and to analyze it further.”
  • Zac Mitton also “offered to run a script to quantify the state size reduction in GB and get back with some results.”
  • The ETC developers are planning on following up on the “state trie clearing topic” in the “next few weeks to reach some consensus of whether to implement it or not.”
  • Cody Burns and other ETC developers on the call “agreed that if the state trie clearing were not included in Atlantis, that would have their support as well.”

In addition to the changes discussed above, other ECIPs were “tangentially mentioned” during the call – including ECIP-1049, a “proposal to change” Ethereum Classic’s current PoW-based mining algorithm.

Additionally, the changes activated with Ethereum’s (ETH) Constantinople hard fork were discussed during the meeting, however these changes will reportedly not be a part of the upcoming Atlantis hard fork.

“Don’t See Any Miner Rule Changes”

Some other important topics brought up during the call included Nick Sawinyh’s (from 2Miners mining pool) statements that there will be no “miner rule changes” from the “mining pool perspective.”

Moreover, from the ETC full-node operator’s perspective, there was reportedly an agreement that the Atlantis hard fork will be supported. This, according to Aaron Lowry, Maciej Nowosielski, and Nick Noriega, the co-founders of Ethernode, a leading “ETH/ETC node hardware and operating system company.”

Ethernode’s management also said they “will communicate” all relevant details regarding the upgrade to “their hardware node users.” The communication will also include “a notification to voluntarily upgrade their operating system to include the changes” activated with Atlantis.