ETC Open Letter to Bao Er Ye: Abandon ETH PoW Fork, Miners Should Migrate to ETC
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ETC Open Letter to Bao Er Ye: Abandon ETH PoW Fork, Miners Should Migrate to ETC
Why an Ethereum PoW fork will not succeed—and would be extremely difficult to achieve?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: ETC Cooperative
Translation: TechFlow intern
Editor's note: ETC Cooperative is a 501c3 public charity founded on September 7, 2017, focused on supporting the development and growth of the ETC project.
This open letter comes amid heated discussions around the potential ETH PoW fork, with figures like Jihan Wu (aka "Bao Er Ye") leading the initiative. In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has stated that a potential Ethereum PoW fork is unlikely to achieve long-term widespread adoption.
Below is the full text of the open letter:
Hello, Bao Er Ye:
Let me explain why I believe an Ethereum PoW fork will not succeed—and in fact, would be an extremely difficult endeavor.
During 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 was required, while all the hard work fell on those supporting the fork.
This time, you’ll need to fork Geth (and possibly Erigon, Besu, and Nethermind). Each of these codebases will require removing the POS transition logic, disabling the difficulty bomb, and updating the chain ID for protection. Mining software may also need to be forked or updated to support a different chain ID, and perhaps more. Unlike client code, which is public and open-source, much mining software is closed-source—you’ll need to convince its creators to make these changes, then support them going forward.
You’ll need to collaborate with wallet providers to secure their support for ETHW; you’ll need exchanges on board to list and support ETHW.
After releasing functional client software, you’ll need to coordinate with all node operators to gain their support in running the new software.
All this coordination is incredibly labor-intensive and time-consuming. I know this firsthand from experiencing multiple upgrade cycles within ETC—it’s truly very, very difficult and slow.
Currently, as far as I can see, there is almost zero information on websites, no indication of client or other software development happening (e.g., no GitHub organization).
This is critical and must happen publicly to build trust. Of course, there are no links yet to client software—which is urgently needed so node operators can begin installing these clients online and preparing for the transition. There are also no blog posts, articles, tutorials, or documentation, all of which are essential for coordinating such an effort.
Mere weeks remain until the Merge. It’s already too late to do anything meaningful now.
Even if you manage to release clients and line up a few mining pools and exchanges by the fork date, you’ll still face the issue of how broken the resulting chain will be.
All stablecoins backed by real-world assets (USDT, USDC, etc.) will go to zero on the forked chain, as issuers will support ETH. Nearly everything in DeFi is built on top of these stablecoins, so virtually every DeFi application will be completely destroyed.
During the ETH/ETC split, there were no DeFi applications or stablecoins, so little actual damage occurred. Today, most value on ETH exists in tokenized form—not just native ether. Therefore, a new PoW chain holds no meaningful value for existing ETH users.
All dApps built on Ethereum rely heavily on off-chain resources—their accessible websites, backend servers, community resources, documentation, and most importantly, the people who run them: developers, bug fixers, maintainers, customer support, and so on. All of this disappears at the time of the fork. So even projects whose tokens don’t immediately drop to zero will still be broken and inaccessible for most users, who don’t run their own nodes but instead depend on these third-party services.
Unless specific projects explicitly agree to provide parallel infrastructure (which most won’t), their applications will break—and anything relying on oracles will break as well.
Many projects have admin keys for smart contract upgrades and emergency maintenance operations. These private keys are held by project leads. They won’t hand them over to anyone wanting to run a dApp fork on the PoW chain—why would they? Doing so would only expose them to risk and undermine the value of projects they’ve spent time and money building.
For well-known projects, it’s far more likely they will explicitly choose to disable their smart contracts on the PoW chain—to prevent user confusion and losses.
The situation with NFTs is identical to DeFi: NFTs on the PoW chain won’t be recognized or supported. Do you own Cryptokitties? You won’t get a PoW fork version of them, nor will you get a forked version of NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
Every single item on EthereumPoW would require direct conversations with project teams—and convincing them (through persuasion or payment) that rebuilding all their infrastructure is worth the effort.
This is a massive, daunting coordination challenge. With only weeks until the Merge, the vibrant ecosystem seen today is highly unlikely to reappear on a new PoW chain.
I simply don’t believe such a chain offers any real value to end users—and launching it carries enormous overhead, followed by even greater effort just to make it minimally functional. Regardless of what happens, due to the breaking 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 fully grasp this reality—particularly underestimating or ignoring the “non-forkability” of today’s ecosystem.
There is still time to cancel this fork. Its existence will only create further confusion and inevitably fail after an initial pump, as it will have no real users.
As Barry said, “We fully support ETH PoS outside of ETC and will not support any ETH PoW fork. ETH miners should move to ETC to maximize their earnings sustainably—that’s all there is to it.”
He’s right.
Good luck, Bob.
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