Written: ThePrimedia  

Researcher: Spike  

Editor: ThePrimedia 

Initiator: Jerry

I believe that not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

——Albert Einstein

The original intention of decentralization should not be ridiculed by the group. Especially it concerns the soul of the Web3 world, which determines the future of crypto ecological construction.

Instead of calculating the gains and losses after switching to POS,  it is better to think about what happened. Why the trend of centralization will be applauded?

Signs of the urgency and importance of the decentralization idea  need to be re-emphasized. After Aave and Circle responded to the U.S. Treasury Department’s sanction ban on Tornado Cash, the result was that hundreds of celebrity addresses were “injured” by Aave, and the circulation of USDT surpassed USDC within a week. MakerDAO re-examined the composition of DAI’s collateral… The consequences of stablecoin centralization have already warned everyone that when all this happens in Ethereum, it will completely counteract the first principle of decentralization.

If we don't stop it, then more than a decade after the advent of Bitcoin, the impossible triangle of the blockchain world will be solved. At the cost of abandoning decentralization, it would be a mediocre financial game no different from Wall Street.  Since Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto's imagination of "opening a window and revealing a beam of light" for the world will also vanish.

Fortunately, there are still people in the crypto market who insist on decentralization: BitCoke and its invested mines have officially announced their support for hard forks and token trading, believing that these adherents are defending the spirit of Satoshi Nakamoto’s blockchain; BitMEX launched ETHPOWZ22 derivatives  products; EthereumFair is ready to defend the ideal of PoW with technology, and build a complete financial ecology belonging to ETHPOW... This is also a preparation for defending our original dream.  If the faith is abandoned this time without firing a shot, the dragon slayer will turn into a dragon in a prudent way.

Ethereum is facing the most fragmented hard fork ever, and it's not just a dying struggle for miners to protect their own interests.  At the critical juncture of the Ethereum Merge hard fork, ThePrimemedia interviewed and investigated BitCoke, the EthereumFair community, and the forces of the Ethereum ecosystem that strategically support the hard fork, trying to analyze the logic of the Ethereum Merge hard fork for everyone.

Part 1: The Legitimacy of the Resisters

The conversion of Ethereum to PoS mechanism means giving up adherence to Satoshi Nakamoto, which is the "mission" to the adherents of the hard fork. The Ethereum Merge hard fork can be summarized as energy saving & scalability VS security & decentralization. This is essentially a dispute over the route of blockchain development, rather than a bifurcation dispute in which miners coerce everyone for their own interests. The PoS mechanism will directly prompt the network maintainers and miners to go out. On the surface, it seems to reduce the historical burden of the past, but it is not the case.  New staking nodes will inevitably lead to the centralization of the network.

At present, the TVL of Ethereum accounts for 60% of the public chain track. The win-win situation of miners, users and Ethereum under the PoW mode has achieved the prosperity of the decentralized crypto ecology today, and left more expectations room for the world.  It is not as good as a scholar,  just like the consensus of the EthereumFair technical community. The PoW mechanism is the best way to guard the original intention of blockchain decentralization. If we let it go, decentralization will become an unreachable castle in the air.

Ethereum grew up on the shoulders of Bitcoin. Don't forget the basic elements of Ethereum's success,  PoW and smart contracts together constitute the ecological prosperity of Ethereum:

• PoW is a mining mechanism. Miners compete for accounting rights through hash collisions and sort transactions. PoW is a guarantee for everyone's fair participation in Ethereum.
• Smart contracts are the basis for complex operations such as DeFi, NFT, and GameFi. For the first time, a public chain ecosystem in which multiple on-chain assets coexist has been realized.

The PoW model created by Satoshi Nakamoto is not a golden rule.  The fundamentalist orientation of technology will only tie our hands and feet, but the development from Bitcoin’s mainnet launch to the present is the best comment on PoW, which can be understood as “Nakamotoism” has passed the test of history. In the blockchain world, decentralization, security and scalability are the impossible triangles that have never changed. The merger of Ethereum is just escaping this problem, rather than seeking a fundamental solution. After abandoning PoW,  the objectivity of transaction confirmation will disappear, as will the physical connection between Ethereum and the real world.

The logic of adhering to POW is clear: in the Bitcoin PoW mode, the principle of final confirmation by miners is the longest chain principle. Specifically on Ethereum, it is the principle of Heaviest Chain under the control of the Ethash algorithm, but the commonality is that it needs to be confirmed by miners of the unanimous consensus, and the  steps are algorithm + mining machine computing power + block confirmation. In the PoS mode, the consensus of staking nodes dominate the confirmation result, and the real random number confirmation can not be realized until the fifth stage of Merge. Before that, Ethereum would be a random walk numbers game.

On the basis of communicating with the POW adherents, let's analyze the logic of the "Vgods".  In Vitalik Buterin's view, switching to PoS mode is the only way to upgrade TPS (transactions per second). But behind this, it is the competition for capital (32ETH) + high performance to deal with the pursuit of the new public chain of  Aptos/Sui in the Move ecosystem . The first step of the ETH2.0 roadmap is launched from the Ethereum beacon chain, which aims to introduce a safer and more efficient proof-of-stake mechanism for the consensus layer of the Ethereum network, and get rid of the severe consumption of energy after integration with ETH1.0, towards a proof-of-stake-oriented consensus mechanism.

Let's take a look at the main events in the transformation of POS. On the way to Ethereum, "Ethereum 2.0" mainly has two upgrades: one is the consensus change from POW to POS; the other is the sharding technology for network performance expansion.

• "ETH 1" is now the "execution layer"that handles transactions and execution;
• "ETH 2" will be the "consensus layer" that handles stakeholder proof consensus;

After merging "ETH 1" and "ETH 2" into a single chain, there will no longer be two different Ethereum networks, the term "ETH 2" will be completely abandoned, and only the overall concept of "Ethereum" will remain in the end (  The term is only used to update the naming and does not change the goals or roadmap of Ethereum).

In the opinion of the EthereumFair research team, these two upgrades cannot be effective in the PoS mode. Protecting PoW is not only beneficial to miners, mining pools and mining machine manufacturers, and the PoS mechanism will not be the dividing point that changes everything. The PoS mechanism has always been explored. It  is not a completely new algorithm idea.  Vitalik say that 32eth is more decentralized than thousands of mining machine.  However, compared with giving up PoW to transform POS, a better solution is that Layer 1 can only do what must be done. Such as consensus, bookkeeping rights distribution, and all performance improvements can be placed in Layer 2.

"Sacrificing the security and decentralization of Layer 1 is actually completely unnecessary." This is the core idea of EthereumFair, which is in line with the official attitude of BitCoke who strategically supports hard forks: security and stability are the cornerstones of the development of public chains.  Efficiency is not the only goal pursued by the public chain. Many application scenarios pursue security and stability, especially large funds, such as loans and mortgages. There are many solutions to improve the efficiency of POW, such as Layer 2. POS is not the best solution. 

In the logic of the adherents, the transformation of POS has a greater negative impact on division.  The core competitiveness of a public chain is not a certain mining model, but its ability to operate steadily and gradually build its own ecology.  The fork crisis faced this time will lead to the division of the community and the ecosystem on the chain.  This kind of split happened once when The DAO was attacked in 2016, the community who insisted on the immutability of the blockchain insisted on confirming that the block state after the attack became ETC, and insisted on rolling back to the block state before the hacker attack become ETH today.

The later fact is that ETC is operating in a bleak way, and the ETH is prosperous.  Is this (ETC) a mistake?  This time, the adherents need a belief in the legitimacy of the hard fork. This legitimacy is the best interpretation of the concept of decentralization.  The attitude of the EthereumFair team is that the fork is definitely not a one-off, but a long-term construction after recognizing the reality.  It can be assumed that the forked ETH-POW chain will encounter many problems, such as:

• Lack of on-chain DeFi/NFT/GameFi ecosystem
• Mainstream stablecoins such as USDT/USDC are not supported
• Lack of enough developers to update clients
• Insufficient number of network status confirmations
• Facing more aggressive attacks by hackers

These difficulties exist objectively, but the rationality of the fork itself should not be questioned.  Abandoning PoW will cause the fairest mining mechanism envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto to become a game of capital. In Ethereum 2.0, the minimum pledge amount of nodes is 32ETH. After switching to the POS mechanism, all nodes in ETH need to vote for each block. Only a block that receives 2/3 of the locked ETH votes of the entire network is considered a valid node.  In terms of mechanism design, there is a tendency to expel small and micro retail investors, and it relies more on the support of giant whales. After the PoS mechanism is adopted, in order to ensure network stability and improve the ability to capture token value, increasing the number of pledges is almost the only solution. This would further exclude the degree of decentralization.

Therefore, the "Ethereum 2.0" plan, which seems to be an upgraded version of Ethereum, is actually a brand new project.  Most of the conventional forks require computing power to make choices, and the protagonist is the miner system. The focus of this POS fork is not the competition of computing power, but the game of capital.  At present, in the PoW state, Bitcoin has a total of 14,516 nodes in the world, of which the number of full nodes is 13,097, accounting for more than 90%, while the total number of Ethereum nodes in the world is 4,896. After converting to PoS, the number of pledges in the entire network will increase significantly, but the degree of decentralization cannot be guaranteed. 

In this game about the future, miners are faced with a life-or-death choice: the first choice is to sell the mining machine, use the sold ETH to participate in the POS Staking mechanism, and become one of the vast nodes; the second choice is to directly  switch the mining machine to the ETC network, in other words, ETH2.0 will prompt the mining industry worth 19 billion US dollars to find new gold rush fields; the third option is to hard fork ETH-POW, keep the original PoW model, and choose to rebuild the PoW ecology. In a sense, this is the hardest road, but it is the road that is most in line with the spirit of decentralization.

This most difficult path has already received an ecological response. For example, the exchange Bitcoke will not only support hard fork token transactions, but also fully support the ETH head mines that Bitcoke has invested 100 million US dollars for its important shareholders. The strategic layout of Bitcoke's investment in mines is the vision of DeFi development with the goal of asset tokenization and free pledge, lending, and trading in the global market. At the moment of the Ethereum Merge hard fork, it has become the backing of the adherents.

Following the Satoshi Nakamoto spirit of Bitcoin, Ethereum has been placed in high hopes by the encrypted world, but since its development, it has become farther and farther away from the point. This is the mission and return of the adherents that the concept of decentralization must be reconsidered.

Part 2 :The Battle of the Redemption Routes

After a consensus has been reached on the legality of a hard fork, how to fork has become the core focus of the debate.

• Action first group: focused on exchanges such as BitCoke, strategically support hard forks and build an offensive and defensive alliance including mining machine manufacturers, miners and the market, rebuild the ETHPOW ecological reality, and leave room for discussion on secondary liquidity;
• Ecological construction group: focused on technical communities such as EthereumFair, it is hoped to build a complete set of ETH-POW ecology including stablecoins and DeFi application support as much as possible, and continue the current ecological scene;
• Waiting to pick peach group: ETC hopes to attract ETH computing power to itself as much as possible, and Conflux initiated a community proposal to change its PoW mining algorithm to Ethash which is beneficial for miner switching.

BitCoke launched its official plan. The details of the plan are as follows: BitCoke supports all Ethereum hard fork tokens and related airdrops. BitCoke will launch hard fork token contracts. BitCoke believes that hard fork tokens are seriously undervalued and predicts hard forks tokens may stand at $1,000; Justin Sun also said that his USDD will support the forked ETHPOW chain and solve the problem of stablecoins on the chain entering and exiting the gold channel, but Guo Hongcai’s perspective is completely focused on the miners themselves, and believes that the miners have paid a lot,  it is time to stand up to defend their interests...

It is worth mentioning that Bao Erye (Guo Hongcai), who is currently the loudest voice in the market, focuses too much on the interests of miners, and there is no clear development timetable. Whether it can attract enough developers, applications and ordinary users to participate remains to be seen in the future.  Simply attracting miners to join is not attractive to users. The common interests of miners and users will make the forked POW chain really come alive.

source：https://ethereumpow.org/

Therefore, there will be more ecological forces in the market to make better choices and development directions in the game.  Capital poured in first, and Buterin also encouraged miners to transfer, which can not only maintain the interests of miners, but also minimize the damage to the Ethereum ecosystem.  But the potential harm of the influx of ETC mining has caught the attention of the market.

EthereumFair researcher said, "When a large number of miners pour into ETC mining, it is good for ETC in the short term, but the secondary market must have sufficient liquidity to bear pressure. Under the circumstance that the coin price increase is limited, the result will skyrocket the difficult of ETC. It makes ETC more difficult to mine." The most important problem is that ETC's capacity is too limited to bear so much computing power.  Although the ETH graphics card mining machine is not as power-consuming as the Bitcoin mining machine, and the price of the closed currency is not as high as that of the BTC, but the competition for forced hard mining of ETC is too fierce.  Therefore, the influx of a large number of miners will form involution, and the return cycle will become long

What the crypto world needs is ETHPOW, not ETC.  According to CoinMarketCap data, ETC is currently priced at around $40, or about 1/50 of ETH.  Unless ETC can rise to $2,000, it can fully accommodate ETH’s computing power, while maintaining the current cycle unchanged. A 50-fold surge is an impossible spectacle. From a rational perspective, this is not the way for miners.  Neuroscience Ph.D@0xAA believes: "ETC cannot catch the computing power of ETH miners. The most beneficial solution for miners is to perform a hard fork when the Ethereum main network is transferred to POS, and create an ETH-PoW, which is more valuable than the ETC chain. After all, the Ethereum ecosystem is much richer than when ETC was forked."

Final Part: Future Ecological Buidler

In the history of the development of Ethereum, this is the second global crisis. The last time proved the weakness of ETC, but left a faint fluorescence that adhered to the concept of decentralization. This gleam is not enough to become a prairie fire,  but it gives enough legitimacy to the hard fork.

POW is the only blockchain system that has been verified to be completely decentralized and stable so far.  All POS public chain systems have experienced security or inaccessibility issues, essentially because the POS system relies on centralized nodes.  The fundamental difference between ETH and other public chains is POW, and only POW cannot be achieved by other public chains. ETH to POS is a self-abolished behavior, and will lose its greatest advantage. It became a starting line with other second-tier public chains. Everyone's mechanism, speed, rate, security, etc. are the same. Why choose the Ethereum POS chain? Does it depend on feelings?  This is the basis for the value judgment of the exchange BitCoke and its investment mine strategy to support the hard fork of Ethereum.

From the perspective of value, BitCoke's point of view is representative. POW is a heavy asset investment, POW is valuable for anchoring and supporting, while POS is a pure financial capital game, and value cannot be truly effectively supported; from a technical point of view, legitimacy is a fair definition of block confirmation objectivity, and from the perspective of consensus, legitimacy is the effective adherence and application of the PoW mechanism. There is no absolute difference between PoS and PoW, but in the face of the pursuit of emerging public chains,  Ethereum’s civil war is undoubtedly an ineffective consumption of abuse of its dominance.

source：https://wenmerge.com/

ETHPOW is destined to be more than one, and the tension among users, miners and ecology will dominate the future direction of the fork, and ecological construction will become a long-term wrestling field after a short-term carnival.  This is the best era, we can fall into a carnival, and ordinary users will get airdrops from various forked chains; this is the worst era, we will witness the cruel and bloody ecological competition, and finally we will decide the king of POW ecosystem.   ETC belongs to the mediocre people who cannot support. It is difficult to undertake the historical mission of the new fork chain. New PoW chains such as EthereumFair will have the opportunity to run into a new world. Of course, which chain will win in the end will take the test of time.

The future must belong to buidlers who focus on ecological construction for a long time.  In public chain competition, ecology is the foundation of everything. Users do not bear the responsibility for the survival of the public chain. Better experience and economic returns are always the most original motivation for his users. Only by building a better ETHPOW ecosystem can the forked PoW chain be guaranteed.  The foundation is everlasting, not a flash in the pan, falling into nothingness.  Below, we will introduce the development concept, technical strength, ecological construction and progress of EthereumFair, a fork chain of Ethereum that continues the PoW mining method, based on the research and interview with the EthereumFair technical development team.

The development of a public chain requires the support of supporting infrastructure. From the perspective of users, a public chain with complete functions and availability is attractive enough.  In the words of the EthereumFair technical development team, "It is fair for ETH to fork POW, and it will not be an investment institution that has a great interest in the early days. We hope that these funds and friends who supported EthereumFair in the early days will all come to support the EthereumFair technical community leading the push for the ETH fork. The Ethereum foundation is moving to the POS fork and we will keep the original chain.”

The Ethereum fork chain EthereumFair is dominated by the EthereumFair (ClassZZ) technical community. Its PoW technology of ClassZZ public chain has been successfully operated for 3 years. The current technical research and development team includes math experts, chip experts and developers who have been in the industry for more than six years.  Specific to the action, the current EthereumFair development team has implemented a list of functions as follows:

• Complete the research and development of cross-chain support functions for the       ETHPOW chain;
• Infrastructure such as testnet, browser, etc.;
• DeFi, stablecoin and other financial facilities have been prepared 

It can be seen that for this fork, the EthereumFair community will support the POW mining mode of Ethereum to continue the ecology on the chain to the greatest extent.  Ecology is the foundation of public chain competition, and attracting enough miners to participate can build sufficient network security for a high-performance network and avoid repeating the mistakes of ETC.

The EthereumFair team sets the mining difficulty factor from zero, and the minimum requirement is a personal laptop to participate in it, which is also beneficial to ordinary users rather than large miners and mining pools.  After solving the security problem on the chain, more participants are needed to build it together. The forked chain should not be an exclusive ETC-style self-entertainment, but an open chain of public chains.

In terms of development, the EthereumFair community is currently focusing on the implementation of the test network, focusing on difficulty control and block reward adjustment, striving to provide the same mining program as Ethereum, which is convenient for all users to download by themselves. At the same time, infrastructure such as block browsers will be provided and testing can be carried out as early as August.

EthereumFair also intends to absorb the fresh blood of foreign mining pools and large miners to supplement the existing public chain. After the public chain is in a stable state, it will conduct in-depth docking with mining machine manufacturers. For example, mining machine manufacturers have begun to negotiate custom mining machines.  The latest news is that for the hard fork of Ethereum, the exchange BitCoke and its ETH head mine that invested 100 million US dollars for its important shareholders will also fully support it.

In addition, well-known funds and ecological partners will cooperate with the EthereumFair technical community to promote the ETH fork chain.  For example, EthereumFair's L2 public chain ecological R&D team will also enter the current fork synchronously, and bitkeep, swftc and tokenpocket will provide in-depth support in wallet, presenting the current Ethereum infrastructure and dex as the earliest tools to provide  developers and users.

As the first successful fork project of Ethereum, ETF pays tribute to all blockchain networks that support the PoW consensus mechanism. The address of 0x00000000219ab540356cbb839cbe05303d7705fa currently pledges is 13,185,717 ETH, and the Token in st-eth is distributed according to the public key (September 6th previously issued transactions) to BTC token holders (55%), DOGE token holders (15% each); then allocated according to the address (no need to send transactions) to ETC, CZZ token holders (15% each).

This prosperous fork is a traffic feast that every exchange will not miss. At present, the attitude of the following exchanges can be determined. The profitable ecological construction will attract their support in the secondary market and build in-depth transactions that belong to ETHPOW.  

The follow-up of centralized exchanges will solve the problem of transaction depth, and the native financial assets on the chain will start with decentralized stablecoins, especially after Aave follows the sanctions, DAI will be more decentralized, which is also conducive to  the development of stablecoins on the native chain.  Specifically, although Usdt and Usdc will not publicly support POW or POS fork chains, because it takes time to accumulate from on-chain stability to early ecological stability, it is a gradual process, and decentralized stablecoins such as DAI may be used in the early stage, and the use of cross-chain stablecoins.

Moreover, in order to further consolidate the ecology on the chain, the focus of this fork is that the ETHPOW chain has added cross-chain function, not an internal chain, but a POW+ external chain, which can support the forked chain to lead to any other chain. This underlying technology can ensure the stable financial activities of the public chain in the early stage and avoid the death spiral caused by excessive speculation.  Because the adherents have obtained the legitimacy and spiritual support for this hard fork, the strategic deployment is also. what really determines the success or failure of the fork is whether the ETHPOW ecological construction can be effective.  If you lose PoW, you will lose miners; if there is no ecology, there will be no future.