ETC responds to Ethereum fork: PoW fork will not succeed, miners should give up

Original title: An Open Letter to Chandler Guo

Original source: ETC Cooperative

Original translation: TechFlow intern

Editor's Note: ETC Cooperative is a public charitable fund that complies with 501c3 tax law. It was established on September 7, 2017 and focuses on supporting the development and growth of the ETC project.

The background of this open letter is that the ETH PoW fork theory is being hotly discussed, and Chandler Guo and others are the leaders of this event. In this regard, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that the potential Ethereum PoW fork is unlikely to gain widespread adoption in the long term.

The following is the text of the open letter:

Hello, Chandler Guo:

Let me explain why I think an Ethereum POW fork will not succeed and will even be a very difficult thing to do.

At the time of the ETH/ETC split, supporting ETC was the easiest thing in the world - just keep mining, just keep running the same client software. No extra effort was required, and the hard work was all on the side supporting the fork.

This time, you will need to fork Geth (and possibly Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind). Each of these codes will need to remove the POS transition logic, disable the difficulty bomb, and update the chain ID to provide protection. Mining software may also need to be forked/updated to support different chain IDs, and perhaps more. Unlike client code, which is public and open, a lot of mining software is closed, and you will need to convince its creators to make these changes and then support them.

You will need to work with your wallet provider to agree to support ETHW; you will need to work with your exchange to agree to support ETHW.

After you release working client software, you will need to work with all the node operators in order to gain their support to run the new software.

All of this coordination is very hard work and takes a long time. I know this because I have been through multiple upgrade cycles of ETC and it is really, really difficult and slow.

Currently, from what I can see, there is almost zero information on the website, and no information about where the client and other software development takes place (i.e. the Github organization).

This is really critical and needs to happen in the open to build trust. There are certainly no links to the client software, which is urgently needed so that node operators can start working to get these clients online in preparation for the transition. There are also no blog posts, articles, tutorials, or other documentation that would be critical to coordinating this effort.

There are only a few weeks left until the merger. It's too late to do anything now.

Even if you manage to get a client released and a handful of mining pools and exchanges aligned when the fork occurs, you’ll still be faced with the question of how broken the chain will be.

Because all stablecoins backed by real-world assets (USDT, USDC, etc.) will go to zero, and issuers will back ETH. Almost everything in DeFi is built on these stablecoins, so almost every DeFi project will be completely destroyed.

At the time of the ETH/ETC split, there was no DeFi or Stablecoin, so there was no real disruption. Now, most of the value on ETH is in tokens, not just native ether. Therefore, a new PoW chain would be meaningless to existing ETH users.

All dApps built on Ethereum have a lot of off-chain resources associated with them - the website they allow access to, the servers running the backend services, community resources and documentation, and most importantly the people who run their dApps - development, bug fixes, maintenance, customer service, etc. All of this will disappear at the fork, so even those projects that don't go to zero immediately will still be broken and inaccessible to most users because they don't run their own nodes and rely on these third-party services.

Unless a specific project agrees to provide parallel infrastructure for their project (most won’t), that project will be broken, and so will anything with oracles.

Many projects have admin privileges for smart contract upgrades and emergency maintenance operations. These require private keys and are held by the project leaders. They won’t hand over their private keys to someone who wants to run a dApp fork on a new PoW chain, and why would they? It only puts them at risk and affects the value of the project they spent time and money building.

For the big-name projects, it is more likely that they will explicitly choose to shut down their smart contracts on the new PoW chain - to avoid user confusion and losses.

The situation with NFTs is the same as the situation with DeFi, NFTs on the PoW chain will not be recognized or supported, do you have Cryptokitties? You won't get a PoW forked version of these things, and you won't get a forked version of an NFT market like OpenSea.

Anything on EthereumPOW requires explicitly talking to the project team and convincing them (either in conversation or money) that it’s worth it for them to duplicate all of their infrastructure to rebuild.

This is a huge and arduous coordination task, and the merger is only a few weeks away. Today’s prosperity will most likely not be repeated on the new Pow chain.

I just don’t think such a chain provides any value to actual end users, not to mention the huge burden of launching the chain itself, and then the additional effort to make it actually functional. But no matter what happens, the chain itself will become a post-fork disaster zone due to the breakup of DeFi and NFTs, and there is no way to avoid this pain.

I don’t think you and other EthereumPOW supporters have a deep understanding of this, especially underestimating or ignoring the reality of “unforkability”.

There is still time to cancel this fork, its existence will only create more confusion and will inevitably fail after the initial pump as it will have no users.

As Barry said, "In addition to ETC, we fully support ETH PoS and will not support any ETH PoW fork. ETH miners should move to ETC to maximize their income in the long run, it's that simple."

He is right.

Good luck, Bob.