Open Letter from ETC to Master Bao Er: Abandon ETH PoW Fork, Miners Should Transition to ETC

Written by: ETC Cooperative

Compiled by: TechFlow intern

Editor's note: ETC Cooperative is a public charity fund compliant with 501c3 tax law, established on September 7, 2017, focusing on supporting the development and growth of the ETC project.

The background of this open letter is the heated discussion around the ETH PoW fork, led by figures like Chandler Guo. In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that a potential Ethereum PoW fork is unlikely to gain widespread long-term adoption.

Here is the main text of the open letter:

Hello, Chandler Guo:

Let me explain why I believe the Ethereum PoW fork will not succeed and will even be a very difficult endeavor.

When the ETH/ETC split occurred, supporting ETC was the easiest thing in the world—just keep mining and continue running the same client software. No extra effort was needed, and all the hard work was on the side supporting the fork.

This time, you will need to fork Geth (and possibly Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind). Each of these codebases will need to have the PoS transition logic removed, the difficulty bomb disabled, and the chain ID updated for protection. Mining software may also need to be forked/updated to support the different chain ID, and perhaps more. Unlike client code, which is public and open, much mining software is closed-source, and you will need to persuade its creators to make these changes and then support them.

You will need to work with wallet providers to agree to support ETHW; you will need to work with exchanges to agree to support ETHW.

After you release the working client software, you will need to collaborate with all node operators to gain their support to run the new software.

All this coordination is very arduous and takes a long time. I know this from experiencing multiple upgrade cycles of ETC, which were indeed very, very difficult and slow.

Currently, as far as I can see, there is almost zero information on the website about client and other software development (i.e., GitHub organization).

This is really critical and needs to be done in public to build trust. Of course, there are no links to client software published, which is urgently needed so that node operators can start working to install these clients online and prepare for the transition. At the same time, there are no blog posts, articles, tutorials, or other documents, which are crucial for coordinating this work.

The merge is only a few weeks away. It is too late to do anything now.

Even if you manage to release the client and broker a few mining pools with exchanges at the time of the fork, you will still face the issue of how devastated the chain will be.

Because all stablecoins backed by real-world assets (USDT, USDC, etc.) will go to zero, and issuers will support ETH. Almost everything in DeFi is built on these stablecoins, so nearly every DeFi project will be completely destroyed.

At the time of the ETH/ETC split, there were no DeFi or stablecoins, so there was no real destruction. Now, most of the value on ETH exists in the form of tokens, not just the native Ether. Therefore, the PoW new chain is meaningless to existing ETH users.

All dApps built on Ethereum have many related off-chain resources—websites they allow access to, servers running backend services, community resources and documentation, and most importantly, the people running their dApps—development, bug fixing, maintenance, customer service, etc. All of this will disappear at the time of the fork, so even for those projects that won't immediately go to zero, they will still be broken and inaccessible for most users because they do not run their own nodes but rely on these third-party services.

Unless specific projects agree to provide parallel infrastructure for their projects (most will not), the project will be destroyed, and anything with oracles will also be affected.

Many projects have admin privileges for smart contract upgrades and emergency maintenance operations. These require private keys held by project leaders. They will not hand over the private keys to those who want to run dApp forks on the PoW new chain; why would they do that? It would only expose them to risk and affect the value of the projects they have spent time and money building.

For well-known projects, the more likely scenario is that they will explicitly choose to shut down their smart contracts on the PoW new chain—to avoid user confusion and loss.

The situation for NFTs is the same as for DeFi; NFTs on the PoW chain will not be recognized or supported. Do you have Cryptokitties? You will not get a PoW fork version of those, nor will you get a forked version of NFT markets like OpenSea.

Anything on EthereumPOW needs to be explicitly discussed with the project team and persuade them (whether through conversation or money) that it is worth their while to replicate all their infrastructure to rebuild.

This is a huge, daunting coordination task, and with only a few weeks until the merge, the current prosperity is unlikely to be replicated on the PoW new chain.

I just don’t believe such a chain can provide any value to actual end users, let alone the enormous burden of launching this chain itself, and then needing even more effort to make it actually work. But whatever happens, due to the fracture of DeFi and NFTs, the chain itself will become a disaster zone post-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 "non-forkability" reality.

There is still time to cancel this fork; its existence will only cause more confusion and will inevitably fail after the initial pump because it will have no users.

As Barry said, "We fully support ETH PoS, except for ETC, and will not support any ETH PoW fork. ETH miners should transition to ETC to maximize their income in the long run, plain and simple."

He is right.

Good luck, Bob.