Hard-fork to be Deployed Within 24 Hours of The Merge: Ethereum POW

EthereumPoW (ETHW), the splinter of the proof of work from the Ethereum blockchain, announced its plan to launch a hard-fork mechanism within 24 hours after the Merge.

EthereumPoW - the social media account behind the forthcoming ETHW mainnet - has published the plan in a thread detailing the strategy on Twitter.

"The exact time will be announced 1 hour before launch with a countdown timer, and everything including final code, binaries, config files, nodes info, RPC, explorer, etc. will be made public when the time’s up," the Twitter thread said.

In order to make sure that the chainID switches to 10001 successfully, the mainnet will start at the block height of the Merge block "plus" 2048 EMPTY blocks as padding. Also, the chain is the longest chain of ETHW, according to the thread.

Following the update, + 2049 will be the 1st block on ETHW that may contain any transactions.

"Therefore, the Merge block + 2049 will be the 1st block on ETHW that may contain any transactions. Block rewards for the empty blocks will be directed to the 1559 multi-sig wallet," according to the EthereumPoW thread.

It also added that mining difficulty in the initial phases would not be lower than ~220 T, or 15 TH/s in terms of hashrate.

However, the strategy has not been clear to everyone. According to The Block, some developers are puzzled because the decision to delay the code release and update the chainID has been pushed until the last minute.

According to a pull request on GitHub by a Coinbase Distinguished Software Engineer, it was noted that a new chainID had yet to be submitted. It also stated that using the same chainID post-merge would pose a significant risk to replay or double-spend attacks.

Per the introduction from online media outlet Decrypt, EthereumPoW, the Proof-of-Work driven protocol, is the core asset of Chinese crypto miner Chandler Guo, who announced the proof-of-work Hard-fork on Twitter on July 27; The Hard-fork refers to a protocol change of a blockchain network that is effectively split into two branches; one that follows the previous protocol while other protocols follow the new version.

The Ethereum merge is expected to conduct on September 15, a software system upgrades from its original Proof-of-Work-based mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake-based system. The upgrade is expected to be more environmentally friendly during the mining operations.

Yet, details of the Merge are yet to be clarified, and much confusion is still hovering, and it remains to be seen how users and exchanges will perceive an ETHW chain.