As the second-largest blockchain Ethereum gradually nears the long-awaited Beacon chain merge phase, it’s becoming apparent that not all the network users and miners are interested in the new chain.
Forking Ethereum won’t be easy
Popular Chinese cryptocurrency miner Chandler Guo has been leading the talks about forking the current Ethereum PoW network. Guo intends to release the PoW version of Ethereum ahead of the merge. However, the development team behind Ethereum Classic argued that forking the network is awfully hard and explained why an Ethereum PoW fork wouldn’t work.
In an open letter directed to Chandler Guo, ETC Cooperative explained that it was technically easy to fork Ethereum was Ethereum Classic was created than now.
At the time of the ETH/ETC chain split, supporting ETC was the simplest thing in the world to do – just keep mining. Just keep running the same client software. It was a zero-effort thing to do. The hard coordination work was all on the pro-fork side.
ETC Cooperative.
Why Ethereum PoW forks won’t work
To fork Ethereum now, the developers would need to also fork Geth (and probably also Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind) and remove the POS transition logic in each of those codebases, including the difficulty time bomb. The developers would also need to change the Chain ID to “provide replay-protection,” ETC Cooperative explained.
As the Chain ID changes, the mining software also needs to be updated to support the new network, which can be difficult because mining software is usually closed source. Thus, the creators of the softwares need to be persuaded to make the relevant changes. Exchanges and wallet providers also have to support the chain.
Unless Ethereum applications or projects agree to establish a parallel infrastructure for their project, most of these projects and related tokens will be broken as the fork happens, ETC Cooperative said.
Vitalik Buterin comments on Eth forks
While speaking at a recent developer conference, the co-founder of Ethereum Vitalik Buterin said he doesn’t expect Ethereum to be significantly impacted by spin-offs after the merge happens.
During the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in July, Buterin acknowledged that not everyone welcomes the idea of Ethereum 2.0. He recommended that PoW lovers use Ethereum Classic (ETC) instead, saying ETC bears the original vision of Ethereum among other PoW blockchains.
