Ethereum hard forks are getting more intense: forking for the sake of forking or to preserve the interests of miners?

As we all know, Ethereum will officially usher in The Merge in mid-September, and everyone has already heard about the many impacts and advantages of PoS. However, it is also in the conversion of the consensus mechanism that the PoW miners will also usher in their own hard landing.

Therefore, in order to protect their interests, support for Ethereum fork has become increasingly popular.

Crypto hedge fund Galois Capital shared a survey: "Will Ethereum split into two chains after The Merge". 53.7% of respondents said the merger will go smoothly, but 33.1% believed that the chain may split. If it does split, there will be PoW and PoS tokens, even if the PoW version of ETH already exists.

History of Ethereum Hard Forks

In the history of Ethereum development, it has experienced many "hard forks", such as the Constantinople Hard Fork, Istanbul Hard Fork, Berlin Hard Fork, London Hard Fork, etc.

Most hard forks are planned as part of a roadmap and contain updates that are generally agreed upon by the community, which is often referred to as consensus. However, some hard forks do not always maintain consensus, which results in multiple different blockchains. This was the case with the event that led to the Ethereum/Ethereum Classic split.

Ethereum Classic comes after members of the Ethereum community went on to work on a time-sensitive hard fork (the “DAO Hard Fork”).

On July 20, 2016, at block height 1920000, Ethereum introduced an irregular state change through a hard fork, which refunded approximately 3.6 million ETH from a smart contract called The DAO. Some people in the community disagreed with this change, believing that it violated the immutability of Ethereum, and chose to continue the original chain under the name of Ethereum Classic (ETC), and the new chain supported by the Ethereum Foundation was ETH. Although the initial split was centered on The DAO, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are now independent projects.

Several other forks have occurred in Ethereum. Some of these are hard forks, as they split directly from the pre-existing Ethereum network. Examples include Expanse, Ethereum fog (ETF) fork, EtherZero (ETZ) fork, etc.

Others are soft forks: they use Ethereum’s client/node, but run completely separate networks that don’t share any history with Ethereum. There will likely be many more forks in the life of Ethereum.

There are other projects that claim to be Ethereum forks, but are actually based on ERC20 tokens and run on the Ethereum chain. Two examples of this are EtherBTC (ETHB) and Ethereum Modification (EMOD). These are not forks in the traditional sense and are sometimes called airdrops.

Will ETC become the ultimate beneficiary?

As the only blockchain left after the Ethereum hard fork, Ethereum Classic has always lived under the shadow of Ethereum. After the PoW to PoS transition, the destination of Ethereum miners has become a focus of attention. One of their options is to support other blockchains that use PoW or graphics card mining, and the first choice is naturally Ethereum Classic (ETC).

On July 22, Ethereum founder Vitalik responded to miners' opinions at the ETH CC conference, saying that he would not stop converting Ethereum to PoS and encouraged miners who support PoW to switch to ETC. "There are many blockchains, such as Ethereum Classic, which is the original Ethereum and did not betray its original intention by forking The DAO. This is a very popular community, and I think they will definitely welcome fans of PoW... If you like PoW, you should use Ethereum Classic, which is a very good chain."

After Vitalik Buterin made these remarks, the price of ETC skyrocketed. According to TradingView data, ETC rose from 22.8 USD to 45 USD last week, an increase of 66%. As of press time, the price of ETC has fallen back to around 37 USD.

It is worth noting that AntPool, a mining pool under Bitmain, announced on July 27 that it has invested 10 million US dollars to support the Ethereum Classic ecosystem and plans to continue investing more.

However, there are also dissenting voices in the community. Neuroscience Ph.D@0xAA said: "ETC cannot handle the computing power of ETH miners. The most favorable solution for miners is to conduct a hard fork when the Ethereum mainnet switches to PoS and create an ETH-PoW chain, which is much more valuable than the current ETC chain. After all, the current Ethereum ecosystem is much richer than when ETC forked."

Another “hard fork” controversy : forking just for the sake of forking?

Obviously, in addition to switching to support other blockchains that use PoW or graphics card mining, miners have another choice - hard fork Ethereum and retain the PoW consensus mechanism.

According to existing information, a team is planning an Ethereum hard fork.

On July 28, early Bitcoin evangelist Guo Hongcai (Bao Erye) and the Bay Area aWSB Club jointly established the ETH hard fork project, temporarily named ETH.A, which is expected to be launched in September. At present, the project has assembled a technical team and several mining pools.

Is it for the sake of forking, or is it to preserve the interests of miners? The focus of the debate has returned to the "debate on which is better, PoW or PoS".

Kan Jia, a doctoral student in cryptography and distributed systems at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, told Golden Finance: "Because Ethereum was designed many years ago, it has many problems. Forking means carrying the technical baggage of Ethereum, so I think the technology of forking is more difficult than building a new one. It was very painful for Vitalik's team to upgrade Ethereum, and they often missed payments, which is because of the heavy historical baggage. Forking is a complicated matter, and miners have their reasons. I also support PoW. But I advocate the use of the improved EcoPoW instead of the original proof of work, so I would rather build a new chain and bring something new to the blockchain."

Chainlink community ambassador ChainLinkGod.eth directly pointed out the core problem in a post: "After the PoS merger, it is not a real problem for miners to continue to produce blocks on the non-standard PoW version of Ethereum. With all off-chain dependencies destroyed and valuations falling, it will be a completely unusable ecosystem. Only suitable for dumping forked tokens."

As an experiencer and witness of the fork boom, Pzai, founder of 3 Waves Lab, wrote that such scenes seemed to be commonplace at the time. The mainstream fork at the time was not Ethereum but Bitcoin. The Ethereum ecosystem was still barren at the time, and neither DeFi nor NFT was as prosperous as it is today. When it comes to Bitcoin, its own ecological effect is very small, and the decision to rise and fall of the fork is naturally the computing power. But if we still use that old antique to evaluate the present, it would be too dull.

Regarding today's fork discussion, Pzai believes that the dominant voice has shifted from the previous miners to the asset side (in fact, Ethereum is also constantly weakening the influence of PoW miners), and PoS itself is also beneficial to the asset side. Ethereum 2.0 itself has another question about "meaning", that is, the choice of sharding and Rollup. Pzai believes that the preference of the execution layer will not affect the choice of the consensus layer, and people will eventually choose the right path. In the end, only exchanges may choose to accept the fork (and it must not be the hegemony of the heroes in the past, after all, today is different from the past).

Assuming that one faction of Ethereum really forked based on PoW miners, does it have any practical value? Pzai analyzed that it is very simple, the ecosystem needs to be rebuilt (ETH is not DCR), and can miners alone set off a huge wave of "royalty protection" today?

Pzai gave an example. "We have all seen rocket launches. They are usually divided into three stages. The outermost stage is the first to be jettisoned (ETC), followed by the second stage, which is also jettisoned. The last stage relies on two weight reductions to reach the stars and the sea. Indeed, all three stages have done their best for the launch. But when the time comes, it can only fall into the atmosphere and wither like a flower."

"It's a simple truth, Wake Up Bros." said Pzai.