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Our Daily Fight Club: Are they really killing Ethereum?

Igor Grigorchenko

News editor

Aug 18, 2022 at 12:38

An ETC Cooperative employee has written a detailed open letter blaming the future altcoin ETHPOW for its incompleteness. Representatives of the ETHPOW project took up the fight and wrote a post answering pointed questions. Who is right? Will The Merge result in bigger problems?

Highlights from the letters

Executive Director of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative (which maintains Ethereum Classic) Bob Summerwill, published an open letter detailing why the future Ethereum network hard fork with the new altcoin ETHPOW will be disastrous for the ecosystem. He describes the technical problems this will cause and why the new fork will most likely not be sustainable.

A group of miners led by Chandler Guo, who is actively preparing to create a new altcoin called ETHPOW, responded to each of Summerwill’s arguments in detail, saying that The Merge will form a new fork anyway. The user community, exchanges, miners and mining equipment manufacturers oppose the Ethereum Foundation’s initiative to switch to PoS, considering it a tragic mistake.

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Both letters are packed with many little-known details about the process of the future Ethereum fork. We recommend everyone interested in the details of how Ethereum works to read both texts (regardless of the point of view you share). Analysis of both documents shows a tangle of contradictions surrounding The Merge, with a conflict of interest and a split in the Ethereum community almost inevitable.

Below are selected excerpts from both letters.

ETC’s position

Main Thought: ETC Cooperative believes the Ethereum PoW hard fork would not work, as it is not an easy task. Ethereum (ETH) miners would likely shift to Ethereum Classic (ETC) after the Merge in mid-September.

ETC blames the ETHW project for low activity and underestimating the complexity of the fork on modern Ethereum:

At the moment, from what I see, there is close to zero information on the website. No information on where the client and other software development is happen (ie. Github organization). That is really crucial and needs to be happening in the open to build trust. Certainly no links to releases of the client software, which is desperately needed so that node operators can start work on bringing those client installs online in readiness for the transition.

There are no blog posts, articles, tutorials or other documentation which will be essential to coordinating this work. The Merge is only weeks away. It is so so late to do anything.

Even if you do manage to get client software released, and get at least a handful of mining pools and exchanges into a position where the fork will actually happen, and be a reality rather than just the IOUs currently trading, you will still have all the issues with how broken that chain will be.

Also, note this link provided by the open letter. This separate document explains in great detail why modern Ethereum is unforkable — an attempt to create a hard fork will break almost all applications (dApps) based on this blockchain.

The letter ends with these words:

I don’t think that you and other EthereumPOW proponents realize quite how much you have chewed off here, and specifically underestimate or discount the impact of this “unforkability” reality.

There is still time to call off this fork. It will just cause more disruption and will inevitably fail after an initial pump, because it will not have any users.

ETHPOW’s position

Earlier, we wrote in detail about the ETHPOW initiative, and here you can find some basic information about the project.

In response to the accusation of ETCPOW’s lack of activity, the following answer is given:

We have indeed started from zero. We are a grass-roots movement with limited resources. Updating the website is not a top priority as we don’t have a PR budget. Why would the original Ethereum POW chain need advertisements anyway?

  • Github activity: We do not intend on making much change at this point to the already stable codebase.
  • Timeline: A detailed timeline for changes and tests will be published by the end of the month.
  • Documentation: Existing Ethereum documentation is fairly comprehensive. Though some editing is necessary.

It is also acknowledged that NFT/DeFi and other similar dApps are likely to collapse on the new fork. But the main point is that the whole ETH-miner community demands ETHW, and this is the main factor that guarantees the project’s success:

You, ser, focused on trivial obstacles and missed the whole world; you don’t, or even try to, understand what the exchanges, miners, and communities really want. Had you understood, you’d know that ETHW would succeed.

For users and buidlers who might have missed the DeFi Summer and the NFT Summer, are they going to miss the ETHW Summer? Surely, there shall be chaos after The Merge like ruins after wars. But the Great War bore the biggest prosperity humanity has ever seen. What would they do?

It also draws attention to the high organizational activity and the presence of many partnerships for the future fork:

Also, the aWSB community has set up a business group to coordinate with crypto exchanges, wallet providers, and other third parties to support the ETHW. Until now, 6 exchanges have supported ETHW’s IOU and Future transactions, and several wallet companies have expressed support.

Also, the first public version of modified code for future ETHW was released yesterday, which confirms that active work is already going on:

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