EthPoW: The pre-mined Ethereum fork no one wants

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The creators behind EthereumPoW, the ill-conceived fork of Ethereum meant to maintain the Proof-of-Work implementation after the Merge, have announced their intention to take the block rewards for 2,048 blocks for themselves, supposedly to help minimize the risk of replay attacks.

At the current value of about $35 per ether in EthereumPoW, and with two ether per block, this is likely to make about $140,000 for the multi-sig wallet.

EthereumPoW has had other problems, including the fact that to avoid replay attacks (where transactions are valid on two separate chains) EthereumPoW needs to change its ‘chain ID.’ Coinbase recently submitted a pull request to make sure that the chain ID would be actually changing.

This led to the EthereumPOW team saying they intend to switch from chain ID ‘1’ to ‘10001,’ however, Tim Moore pointed out that it’s already used by the SmartBCH testnet.

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.

4/n
— EthereumPoW (ETHW) Official #ETHW #ETHPoW (@EthereumPoW) September 12, 2022

Currently, the EthereumPoW whitepaper consists of a cover page followed by seven pages that all simply say, “This page intentionally left blank.”

The “README” file in their documentation says just, “ETHW documents.”

EthereumPoW is very likely to experience issues when it launches, with many contracts and protocols expected to behave erratically as tokens approach their new value on this chain. This will be especially noticeable for protocols involving centralized stablecoins, as those issuers have announced their intention to follow the Proof-of-Stake chain.

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