$ETH: Popular Crypto Analyst Shares His Thoughts on a Potential PoW Fork of Ethereum
On Saturday (August 6), popular pseudonymous cryptoanalyst “Hasu”, who is Stratey Lead at Flashbots, shared his latest thoughts on a potential upcoming fork of Ethereum around the time of Ethereum’s “Merge” hard fork (which is when the Ethereum network makes the transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake).
Flashbots is “a research and development organization working to reduce the negative externalities of Maximum Minable Value (MEV) mining techniques and avoid the existential risks MEV can cause to government blockchains like Ethereum.” The main focus is “enabling a permissionless, transparent and fair ecosystem for MEV mining.”g Fair redistribution of MEV revenues.
This is how the Ethereum Foundation explains The Merge:
“The merger represents the merging of the existing execution layer of Ethereum (the mainnet we use today) with its new proof-of-stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain. It eliminates the need for energy-intensive mining and instead secures the network using staked ETH. A truly exciting step in realizing the Ethereum vision – more scalability, security and sustainability.
“It is important to remember that initially the Beacon Chain was sent separately from the Mainnet. The Ethereum Mainnet—with all its accounts, balances, smart contracts, and blockchain state—continues to be secured with proof-of-work, even as the Beacon chain runs in parallel with proof-of-stake. The near-merger is when these two systems finally come together, and proof-of-work is permanently replaced by proof-of-stake.
“Let’s consider an analogy. Imagine that Ethereum is a spaceship that is not quite ready for an interstellar journey. With the Beacon Chain, the community has built a new engine and hardened hull. After extensive testing, it’s almost time to replace the new engine with the old midplane. This will merge the new, more efficient engine into the existing ship, ready to put in some serious light years and take on the universe.“
On August 5, CoinDesk reported that the TRON founder had recently said that “he will support development on the existing Ethereum network after the expected merger in September.”
The CoinDesk report went on to say:
“Developers say the transition from a proof-of-work (PoW) system will make the network much cheaper, faster and environmentally friendly. It will also mean the end of an income stream for Ethereum miners, who are rewarded with ether (ETH) tokens for supplying resources to the blockchain. Miners produced over $620 million worth of ether in July alone, data shows, making The Merge a death knell for a significant chunk of money.
“That has led some prominent Chinese miners to propose a hard fork, so even if Ethereum undergoes The Merge and is validated by stakers, the miners will continue to support a newly separated PoW version of the chain – a move that could theoretically preserve their financial activity intact.“
On the same day, Cointelegraph reported that “Vitalik Buterin said during the BUIDL Asia event in Korea that centralized stablecoins such as USDC and USDT will become key decision makers in future hard forks” (and that “had seen no indication” that this would affect the Merge hard fork (which is expected to take place next month).
Anyway, yesterday “Hasu” took to Twitter to talk about this alleged attempt by some miners to create a new fork of Ethereum that uses PoW consensus:
He went on to say:
“a lot of hashpower doesn’t give this chain any significant value… the chance that a major stablecoin will honor redemptions on this fork over eth2 is not 5%, it’s not 1%, it’s a cold zero. anyone who says otherwise is a grifter… if something goes wrong with the merge it’s just delayed until the issues are fixed and then the merge happens a few weeks later… no one in ethical communities except miners wants to keep evidence of work … this fork chain will be a giant shop trap. miners, exchanges, traders all try to talk about it for their own self-interested reasons….
“no one wants to use or build ethpow. I have studied the etc, bch and bsv forks and these actually shared their respective communities. in all cases their minorities were actually believers and not in it for a short-term trade. ethpow doesn’t have 1% of that support… crypto is full of bad projects that only exist to dump on retail, but that doesn’t make it ok to support them. the fact that ghost chains like etc still exist doesn’t prove that point… although most alt chains today are forks of ethereum, none have given ethereum state. not because they didn’t think of it, but because it’s a completely stupid idea“
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Featured image via Pixabay
