A member of the Coinbase staff needed to touch upon the ETHPoW GitHub repository to get the staff to make clear how the forked chain shall be arrange. At the moment, the repository has not up to date the ChainID of the community to 1 that differs from Ethereum Mainnet.
We have reached the purpose within the ETHPoW saga the place the Coinbase protocol staff themselves are submitting PRs to the repo to get the chainID situation solved.
And nonetheless no response from the staff. pic.twitter.com/AhQ3FFWEm4
— frankie (@FrankieIsLost) September 9, 2022
The ETHPoW Testnet makes use of the ChainID 10002, unused by every other chain. Ethereum Mainnet has a ChainID of 1, and loads of different numbers are obtainable to the PoW chain.
Coinbase was not the one staff making an attempt to resolve this situation. 4 different pull requests are requesting the builders replace the ChainID.
The ETHPoW staff responded to Coinbase’s pull request on Sept. 9 and stated:
“The chainid for ethw is 10001, which we are going to publish on our Twitter account. The code you talked about within the above feedback has to maintain as a result of chainID 1 is required to validate chain knowledge for blocks earlier than the merge, and all chain knowledge after the merge shall be chainID 10001.”
This information will calm the nerves of many inside the Ethereum ecosystem within the data that there doesn’t seem to have been malicious intent in not updating the ChainID.
Ethereum PoW and why it issues
A proof-of-work arduous fork of Ethereum post-merge has been theorized a number of instances over the previous few weeks. Justin Solar, the founding father of Poloniex, introduced the trade would assist a tough fork of Ethereum by donating as much as 1 million $ETHPoW to constructing a developer group on the brand new chain.
Nevertheless, a lot has been misunderstood about The Merge and the transfer to proof-of-stake. The primary Ethereum chain, generally known as Mainnet, will proceed to run all through The Merge, with a brand new consensus layer referred to as the Beacon Chain being merged into the present community.
A problem bomb shall be utilized, making mining on Mainnet pointless as it will likely be too arduous to mine new blocks. But, that doesn’t imply miners should cease mining. Miners can mine the upgraded proof-of-stake model of Ethereum, however they are going to be unable to obtain any rewards or contribute considerably to dam manufacturing.
For a proof-of-work model of Ethereum, miners will both should revert to mining Ethereum Basic, which has a a lot smaller ecosystem and lacks any of the numerous dApps discovered on Ethereum Mainnet or create a tough fork of the present Mainnet with out the Beacon chain merge.
A brand new arduous fork that retains the proof-of-work consensus technique can occur anytime. Anybody can fork Ethereum from GitHub at any time. There was some confusion round The Merge, with some individuals believing a proof-of-work model of Ethereum will proceed, and the proof-of-stake model would be the fork.
Confusion for ETH customers
Most of this confusion stems from the Ethereum Basis’s unique language of The Merge, which is known as ETH 2.0. This language has since been dropped to assist customers perceive that no motion must be taken by customers with Ethereum of their non-custodial wallets.
Ought to customers want to take part in a tough fork of Ethereum, they should add a brand new chain to their wallets in an identical means you add Polygon, Avalanche, Optimism, or BNB Chain.
All of those chains are EVM appropriate, that means they share a lot of the identical code as Ethereum Mainnet and a completely interoperable with the identical public deal with getting used throughout all chains.
A brand new ETHPoW chain shall be just like including one other EVM-compatible chain however with all of the belongings, sensible contracts, and tokens being duplicated from Mainnet.
The distinction between ETH and ETHPoW
One of many easiest methods to distinguish between Ethereum Mainnet and ETHPoW shall be to make use of the ChainID. A ChainID is a quantity that identifies the chain to dApps and sensible contracts in order that they know which community they’re interacting with.
Nevertheless, the present GitHub repository that accommodates the ETHPoW code nonetheless has the identical ChainID as Ethereum Mainnet. With no change to this ChainID, dApps and sensible contracts shall be unable to acknowledge the ETHPoW chain, as any transactions will possible fail as a consequence of an absence of consensus from validators utilizing this ChainID.
An additional fear is a risk of “replay assaults” whereby transactions are replayed throughout each chains opening up severe safety considerations.
Now that the ChainID is confirmed to be 10001, customers can put together wallets as soon as an appropriate RPC deal with is launched to obtain ETHPoW airdrops.
