Ethereum POW Proponent Chandler Guo Challenged by ETC Cooperative

ETC Cooperative, a public charity focused on supporting the development and growth of the Ethereum Classic project, on August 8 issued an open letter to Ethereum POW proponent Chandler Guo to challenge the latter’s opinion.

Chandler Guo is one of the most well known Bitcoin and cryptocurrency figures in China. He was one of the first bitcoin miners and was championing bitcoin and other crypto assets before they had become mainstream.

Guo has started a campaign to fork the Ethereum blockchain and create an offshoot. His intentions were confirmed by a Twitter post he made on July 27, tagged “ethpow will coming soon”. This movement spearheaded by Guo apparently creates resistance to Ethereum’s own PoW-PoS transition and forking of the cryptocurrency’s network. This process holds the potential to birth a fork of Ethereum, which Guo calls Ethereum POW.

The ETC Cooperative believes that an Ethereum POW fork wouldn’t work, and even if it did, it would be an awfully hard thing even to do.

“At the time of the ETH/ETC chain split, supporting ETC was the simplest thing in the world to do – just keep mining. Just keep running the same client software. It was a zero effort thing to do. The hard coordination work was all on the pro-fork side,” ETC Cooperative mentioned.

The ETC Cooperative believes that Guo will need to work with wallet providers and exchanges to agree to support ETHW. After the release of a stable working client software, Guo will then need to work with all of the node operators to gather their support to run the new software. At the moment, from what ETC Cooperative sees, there is very little information on the website and no information on where the client and other software development is to happen.

Even if Guo does manage to release client software and get at least a handful of mining pools and exchanges into a position where the fork could actually happen over and above the currently trading IOUs, ETC Cooperative thinks Guo will still have issues with a broken chain of development. All DApps built on top of Ethereum have a variety of associated off-chain resources, which will disappear at the time of the fork. Access for many administrator-run projects for smart contract upgrading and emergency maintenance operations need private keys which are held by project leaders. They won’t be turning those over to people who want to run the DApp fork on the new chain.

SEE ALSO: Magic Eden Submits Proposal to Build NFT Marketplace for ApeCoin

At the end of the open letter, the ETC Cooperative quoted Digital Currency Group’s CEO Barry Silbert’s tweet to solidify its point: “fwiw, our full support is behind ETH PoS, in addition to ETC, and have zero intention to support any ETH PoW fork. ETH miners should move to ETC to maximize their revenue long term. simple as that,” Silbert said.