Original title: "An Open Letter to Chandler Guo"
Original compilation: TechFlow intern
Original compilation: TechFlow intern
Editor's note: ETC Cooperative is a public charitable fund that complies with the 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 bifurcation theory is being heatedly discussed. 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 long-term widespread adoption.
The following is the text of the open letter:
Hello, Chandler Guo:
Please let me explain why I think the Ethereum POW fork will not be successful, and it will even be a very difficult thing.
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 is required, and the hard work is all on supporting the side of the fork.
This time, you will need to fork Geth (and possibly Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind). Each of these codes requires removing the POS transition logic, disabling the difficulty bomb, and updating the chain ID for protection. Mining software may also need to be forked/updated for support of different chain IDs, and maybe more. Unlike client code, which is public and open, a lot of mining software is closed, and you need to convince its creator to make these changes, and then support them.
You will need to work with the wallet provider to agree to support ETHW; you will need to work with the exchange to agree to support ETHW.
After you release working client software, you need to work with all node operators in order to get their support to run the new software.
All this coordination is very hard work and takes a long time. I know this because after going through multiple upgrade cycles of ETC, it was really, really difficult and slow.
Currently, as far as I can see, there is almost zero information on the site, no information about the client and other software development happening (i.e. the Github organization).
This is really critical and needs to be done in public to build trust. And of course there is no link release of the client software, which is urgently needed so that node operators can get to work getting these clients online and getting ready for the transition. Also, there are no blog posts, articles, tutorials, or other documents that are essential to coordinating this effort.
We are only a few weeks away from the merger. It's too late to do anything now.
Even if you manage to get the client side to publish and bring together a handful of mining pools and exchanges when the fork happens, you still have the question of how broken the chain will be.
Because all Stablecoins backed by real-world assets (USDT, USDC, etc.) will go to zero, the issuer will back ETH. Almost everything in DeFi is built on top of these stablecoins, so almost every DeFi project will be completely disrupted.
At the time of the ETH/ETC split, there was no DeFi or Stablecoins, so nothing really disrupted. Most of the value on ETH is now in the form of tokens, not just native ether. Therefore, the new PoW chain is meaningless to existing ETH users.
All dApps built on top of Ethereum have many associated off-chain resources - the websites they allow access to, the servers running their backend services, community resources and documentation, and most importantly the people who run their dApps - the development , bug fixes, maintenance, customer service, and more. All of these will disappear upon forking, so even projects that don't immediately go to zero will still be broken and inaccessible to most users because they are not running their own nodes, but rely on on these third-party services.
Unless a specific project agrees to provide a parallel infrastructure for their project (most will not), the project will be broken, and so will anything that has an oracle.
Many projects have admin privileges for smart contract upgrades and emergency maintenance operations. These require private keys, held by project leaders. They don't hand over the private keys to people who want to fork dApps running on new PoW chains, why would they? It only puts them at risk and the value of the project they spent time and money building.
It is more likely that big name projects will explicitly choose to shut down their smart contracts on new PoW chains - to avoid confusion and loss of users.
The situation with NFTs is the same as it is with DeFi, NFTs on PoW chains will not be recognized or supported, do you have Cryptokitties? You don't get PoW forks of these things, and you don't get forks of NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
Anything on EthereumPOW needs to explicitly talk to the project team and convince them (whether it's the talk or the money) that it's worth them repeating all 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 reproduced on the new Pow chain.
I just don't think such a chain would provide any value to actual end users, not to mention the huge burden of starting the chain itself, and then more effort to make it actually work. But no matter what happens, due to the break of DeFi and NFT, the chain itself will become a disaster area after the fork, 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 this "unforkable" reality.
There is still time to undo this fork, its existence will only cause more confusion and will inevitably fail after the initial pull as it will not have any users.
As Barry said, “We fully support ETH PoS and will not support any ETH PoW forks except ETC. ETH miners should move to ETC to maximize their income in the long run, simple as that”.
He is right.
Good luck, Bob.
