ETC Cooperative questions the feasibility of Ethereum’s PoW fork

A potential Ethereum PoW fork would require enormous coordination and would not be viable if implemented. This view was voiced by the head of the ETC Cooperative, Bob Summerwill, in an open letter to miner Chandler Guo.

Open letter to @ChandlerGuo (with regard to proposed @EthereumPoW fork):https://t.co/EpOqBovUXj pic.twitter.com/faYgXxUXOK

— ETC Cooperative (@ETCCooperative) August 8, 2022

Guo proposed the idea of launching an Ethereum fork that would continue to operate on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm in July. The ETHW fork is intended to allow miners to continue mining after the main Ethereum network’s merge with the Beacon Chain, scheduled for September.

The executive director of the nonprofit organization behind the Ethereum Classic ecosystem explained to the well-known miner why he considers the plan impractical.

Much of Summerwill’s reasoning draws on his own experience participating in the ETH/ETC hard fork. He says it required ‘zero effort’.

He believes implementing Guo’s idea would entail enormous costs, both financial and organizational. To operate the new network, a hard fork of the clients would be required (at least Geth, and possibly Erigon, Besu and Nethermind). In each of these codebases, it would be necessary to:

• remove the logic for transitioning to Proof-of-Stake (PoS);
• disable the difficulty bomb;
• update the chain ID to protect against replay attacks.

Mining software will also require changes. It will be necessary not only to persuade developers to upgrade and test, but also to implement further updates, Summerwill noted.

Project initiators will need to work with wallet providers and exchanges to ensure ETHW support, he noted.

“All of this coordination is extremely heavy work and consumes a great deal of time. I know this because I have gone through several upgrades for ETC. It is really very hard and slow,” said the head of the ETC Cooperative.

He pointed out that there are no signs of even starting work in these directions, even though Ethereum’s The Merge update was only a few weeks away.

If work on the above tasks yields results, the resulting forked network would not be a success, Summerwill says.

He is convinced that the new chain will not have:

• the largest stablecoins like USDT and USDC;
• DeFi projects that largely rely on “stablecoins”;
• NFTs and the associated infrastructure;
• the majority of Ethereum applications, as developers would not create alternative versions of smart contracts.

“I simply don’t see that such a network would offer any value to actual end users. There is a huge coordination burden even to launch the chain itself, and far more effort will be needed to make it truly useful,” Summerwill concluded.

In his view, Ethereum miners should drop Guo’s initiative and instead switch to mining ETC after the merge.

CoinShares analysts have also expressed skepticism about the viability of the potential Ethereum PoW fork.

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