• Ethereum merge imminent
• ETH miners see their source of income dry up
• Chandler Guo wants to preserve Proof-of-Work procedures with new Ethereum fork
Cryptocurrency fans have been looking forward to it for a long time: The Ethereum merge, which is scheduled for September. With the merge comes a big change. Instead of the proof-of-work procedure used until then to verify the blocks anchored in the blockchain, the plan is to switch to the proof-of-stake procedure. The difference is that the PoW process creates new Ethereum tokens that can be mined. However, the process consumes gigantic amounts of energy, which also contributed to the decision to switch to the PoS process. No new ETH tokens are created here, rather users who have a certain amount of Ethereum are randomly selected to validate the next block in the chain. The more Ethereum you own, the more likely it is that you will be selected as a user. This is worthwhile for the user because he in turn receives a reward for making his cryptocurrency available.
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Prospectors fear for their source of income
Anyone who makes the difference between the two methods clear will also understand immediately why the Ethereum merge is tantamount to a catastrophe for miners of the cryptocurrency. Once the network is switched over, all the hardware and software that the professional mining companies have built up at great expense will suddenly become unusable. The ether mining business is thus becoming obsolete.
ETHPOW – Can a new fork help?
So it’s no wonder that Ethereum miner Chandler Guo is fighting tooth and nail against the upcoming merge. He will not be able to do much against the merge itself, he is planning to fork the Ethereum blockchain in the course of the changeover in order to retain the old PoW procedure. A fork is the splitting of a blockchain into two strands. If Guo keeps his word, there will be another version after the fork in addition to the new Ethereum, which uses the proof-of-stake process, which Guo announced via Twitter as “ETHPOW” and which, as the name suggests, will continue to be on the PoW procedure sets. The idea behind it is that crypto miners will still be able to mine ether, so their livelihood will remain.
Numerous challenges
However, there are several problems with this venture. So a fork is not so easy to do. As the crypto news portal “Decrypt” summarizes, the creation of such a new network requires “a huge amount of support, both on an economic and technical level.” Furthermore, such a fork from the Ethereum blockchain would be just that – a whole new network. That means also a new cryptocurrency that initially exists without any underlying value, infrastructure or use. It is also by no means certain that the software and hardware can be used to mine this new cyber device, which would be the declared goal of such a fork. Rather, it is likely that this would first have to be revised in order to be ready for use with ETHPOW.
Ethereum Classic already continues to offer the benefit of the PoW method
In addition, there is already a version of Ethereum that continues to work with the proof-of-work procedure, namely the crypto network Ethereum Classic. This is the original Ethereum blockchain, launched in 2015. After a large-scale hack in 2016, the Ethereum network was forked into two new versions for the first time – today’s Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. Incidentally, Guo was already an advocate of the Ethereum Classic fork back then and, according to Decrypt, the popularity of the Ethereum offshoot has actually increased again since the merger was announced, even if the value of the cyber currency is far behind that of Ethereum.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin unconcerned
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently told reporters that he was not really concerned about another possible fork. As Fortune quotes him as saying: “I don’t expect Ethereum to be significantly harmed by another fork. My impression from pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in the Ethereum ecosystem is that the proof-of-stake upgrade is totally is supported and there is agreement on that.” He went on to say that those who would be calling for a new Ethereum fork would just be “a bunch of outsiders who basically own their own exchanges and most of them just want to make a quick buck. So I don’t think that here long-term adoption will happen, also because I think Ethereum Classic already offers a superior community and product for the people who prefer proof-of-work.”
It is currently more than questionable whether there will actually be an Ethereum fork. The merger cannot be prevented by this either, the second largest cryptocurrency today by market capitalization will continue to exist in one way or another.
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