![Ski](http://i65.tinypic.com/21bt91e.jpg)

This evening, reddit user darawk made an excellent post on the Ethereum subreddit:   https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/4ugjoh/im_prohf_but_the_success_of_etc_may_be_inevitable/

I'll summarize it.    He offered that the DAO Attacker should just Short ETH, Buy ETC, and then refund all the DAO tokens he took (or not interfere with someone else refunding them).   The ETC chain would then have a fix for the DAO exploit without having any of the issues associated with the hard fork.   He reasons that this will result in a substantial decrease in the value of ETH and that the economic incentive to the DAO attacker is substantial enough that such a move is inevitable.

![eth down](http://i64.tinypic.com/2nga4xu.png)


**Here are my questions:**    
*1)  Do you think that an ETC  chain with the stolen DAO tokens refunded will have any lasting value?*

*2) Do you think that the existence of an ETC chain with the stolen DAO tokens refunded will actually result in a reduction in the value of ETH?*

**My thoughts:**
If Chandler Guo's planned 51% attack against ETC actually happens then maybe none of this is even relevant.   But, completely disregarding Chandler Guo's plans, it seems like there are fundamental problems with the proposition that ETC can compete with ETH.      Some people are forgetting that the value of ETH has always been largely tied to it's potential functionality given the support of dapps by the turing complete programming language.  However, as has been pointed out repeatedly, future dapps running on ETC would be vulnerable to replay attacks.  This means that the only way forward for ETC in terms of functionality is really for it to have its own hard fork (to fix the replay attack problem) thereby destroying the immutability its supporters seem to value so highly.      So, the only way for ETC to match the functionality of ETH is to do the one thing that would destroy it's raison d'être.