Alternateth: The Litecoin of Ethereum?
The Ethereum Blockchain is about to see a sister channel appear: Alternateth. This would serve as a place for experimentation and testing of updates before they are applied to the main blockchain.
Alternateth
Alternateth is a project led by James Hancock (team leader at ETHSignals). According to its founder, the network has the ambition to become a blockchain sister of Ethereum, in order to test and validate updates before they are deployed on the Mainnet.
For example, the first major change that should be implemented (before its introduction on the Mainnet) on Alternateth is ProgPow -Progressive Proof-of-Work- the new algorithm for Ethereum mining (which is waiting to be activated on the Mainnet since January 2019
For the moment, this project is still in the development phase. James Hancock said he was in contact with Ethereum developers and miners, who provided him with support for the fork.
This project reminds us of the relatively similar situation between Bitcoin and Litecoin. The latter was created to serve as an experimental laboratory before the improvements were made to the Bitcoin mainnet.
For example, SegWit - Segregated Witness - was deployed on Litecoin a few months before Bitcoin.
Financing developers
Having a test chain is not the only desire behind the Alternateth project. This one wishes to set up a block award to finance the development of the main chain Ethereum.
One of the principal arguments in favour of such a system is that it's impossible to rest forever on the financing of Consensys or the Ethereum Foundation, particularly for reasons of independence.
In addition, developer Lane Rettig revealed that 'the Ethereum Foundation only pays $25 an hour for an experienced developer', between 4 and 8 times less than the rest of the market.
This subject is not new and has already been proposed within Ethereum community as well as within the working group on block awards. After a long debate among many developers, no consensus was obtained. This is one of the reasons why Hancock wants to set up this system on a parallel blockchain.
"It will be a "friendly fork of Ethereum" designed to support and complement the Ethereum blockchain, not to compete with it. "James Hancock
