Evening
Ethereum 2.0 is the talk of the town, as the proposed Merge date continues to draw near. The Merge Fomo is already pumping the Ethereum hard, as the coin successfully overcame $1.8K resistance yesterday.
Along with the crazy pump, Ethereum community also seems divided over the possible chain split. Whereas part of the Ethereum mining community has already committed to continue running the old POW chain, many other core projects have distanced themselves from the possible old POW network in support of the Merge.
The proponents of POW Ethereum chain, led by the veteran Chinese miner vowed to keep the old POW chain alive. The Merge will effectively shift the network consensus mechanism from classic POW to POS, meaning post merge the Ethereum miners will be left with costly mining hardware. Hongcai Gu is certainly trying to capitalize on the existing Ethereum miners with necessary mining infrastructure in place to keep the forked chain running. The old POW chain if come into being will be called ETHPoW.
Chainlink protocol have recently backed away from ETHPoW and vowing to provide their services only on POS based Ethereum chain after the merge. Justin Sun, the notorious founder of Tron blockchain, announced that his Poloniex exchange will support ETHPoW. Crypto exchange BitMEX, announced to offer leveraged trades on ETHPoW providing its customers exposure to the possible hard fork. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik has already declared recently that he don't see any impact of possible hard fork on Ethereum network.
Is ETHPoW Possible?
The success of a possible hard fork resulting in the creation of ETHPoW depends upon the strength of the entities backing it. As the Merge happens, all of the dapp infrastructure will shift to the POS chain, leaving the forked ETHPoW chain without tools, dapps and utility. This means ETHPoW token will have only speculative value at least in the beginning. Developers are gonna be needed to incentivized sufficiently to develop on ETHPoW and turn the chain into something worth using.
Even if Hongcai Gu and other miners manages to keep the ETHPoW chain alive with the help of some powerful miners and exchanges like Poloniex, still it will not guarantee the success of ETHPoW. e.g. Back in 2016, Ethereum network got forked and Ethereum Classic was born. Although ETC have managed to stay alive so far, but its value is still quite unsubstantial in comparison so the parent chain it forked from.
Forking a blockchain is one thing and achieving long term term success is another thing. As far as miners are concerned, they will move where the profit lies. One thing is clear, POWETH might not be a big cash grab as touted, because of excessive dumping pressure and absence of buying wall in the start. However if it manages to stay alive and attracts significant development work bringing utility, ETHPoW might be worth something after all, in the long run of course.
