A potential PoW Ethereum fork would require a huge coordination effort and would not be viable if implemented. This view was expressed by Bob Summerville, president of the ETC Cooperative, in an open letter to miner Chandler Goh.

The idea of ​​launching a branch of Ethereum that would continue to work on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm was voiced by Guo in July. The ETHW presence is intended to enable miners to continue working after the Ethereum mainnet merges with Beacon Chain, scheduled for September.

The managing director of the nonprofit behind the development of the Ethereum Classic ecosystem explained to the well-known miner why he considers his plan inappropriate.

In many ways, Summerville referred to his own experience with the ETH/ETC hard fork. According to him, it took “zero effort” at that time.

Summerville says implementing the Go idea will require huge costs, both financially and organizationally. Hard fork clients (at least Geth and possibly Erigon, Besu and Nethermind) will be required for the new network to work. In each of these codebases you need to:

• Eliminate the logic of transitioning to Proof-of-Stake (PoS);
• disable the difficulty bomb;
• Update the chain id to protect against replay attack.

Mining software will also require modification. Developers will not only need to be persuaded to upgrade and test, but more upgrades will be required, Summerville said.

He reminded that the initiators of the project will need to work with wallet providers and exchanges to provide support for ETHW.

“All this coordination is extremely hard work and takes a lot of time. I know this because I went through several ETC upgrades. It’s really hard and slow,” said the head of the ETC Cooperative.

He noted that although Ethereum has “a few weeks” left until The Merge update, there are no signs that work has begun in these areas.

Summerville believes that if the work on the above tasks yields results, the resulting network as a result of the fork will not be successful. Make sure the new chain will not have:

• The largest stablecoins such as USDT and USDC;
• projects in the DeFi sector, largely based on stablecoins;
• NFT and related infrastructure;
• Most Ethereum implementations, as developers will not create alternate versions of smart contracts.

“I don’t see a network like this providing any value to real end users. There’s a huge coordination overhead to even starting the chain itself, and then it’s going to take a lot more effort to get it really useful,” concluded Summerville.

According to him, Ethereum miners should abandon the Go initiative and instead switch to ETC mining after the merger.

Recall that CoinShares experts were also skeptical about the viability of a potential Ethereum PoW fork.

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