I think this is guaranteed.

As long as one person keeps running the old software, the old chain is alive.

Even if nobody does it, somebody could start running it again at any time.

The different chains will have different market caps. And the general public will forget about chains that have sufficiently small market caps.

I wonder what will happen to Ether that is in custody. Like in the Greyscale Ethereum Trust or the 21Shares Ethereum ETP.

Has anybody ever checked the TOS of these companies on what will happen if multiple forks carry significant value?

False, the difficulty bomb will kill off eth1.

> the difficulty bomb will kill off eth1

Wouldn’t it make sense for miners to switch to a new Ethereum chain without the bomb?

Yes, miners can turn off the bomb, but that requires that they coordinate and determine a schedule for the hardfork that turns off the bomb (you need a hardfork to turn it off).

This scenario is definitely possible, but it requires a little more work than "one guy keeps running an old eth1 node".

isn't it trivial to patch?

Then they will be on a fork of a fork of a fork (ETC -> ETH -> ETH_POW -> ETH_POW minus Difficulty bomb)

who will take this chain seriously

> who will take this chain seriously

If it has 51% of Ethereum’s current hashpower, somebody. (Ethereum Proof of Stake is the same number of forks away from Ethereum Classic.)

The Difficulty Bomb has been delayed at least once, so delaying it once again or defusing it, it not unimaginable.

How would they be on a fork, if the "original" dies because of the difficulty bomb? Since the fork that wasn't bombed would survive, it would be considered the original, wouldn't it?

How is it defined? Like somebody releases a new version with the bomb removed. Most miners adapt it. Why is it then a fork? Because the bomb is a major feature? Otherwise, wouldn't ever software upgrade be considered a fork?

If I understood the conversation from the last dev call correctly, they're talking about combining EIP-1559 and the difficulty bomb fix into the same fork specifically to avoid this

"original" and "fork" have no meaning inside the ETH universe. These terms are used in the outside social milieu.

Stuff like this is exactly why I have chosen to allocate 0% of my cryptocurrency investments into Ethereum. Such a cluster

If I understand right the ETH chain will be integrated as a shard. This would mean it would just live on inside the new Ethereum ecosystem until it is ice aged - so one could say it's not a fork but a wrap of some sort.

Unfortunately not a single resource I found actually describes this process in an easy to understand fashion - pretty amazing considering we are talking about $200+ billion dollars....

Yes but there is already an 'ETH classic'. So there will be three, and the names should actually be 'ETH' (proof of stake), 'ETH for Miners' (proof of work), and 'ETH classic' (existing, for another group that didn't like a previous important change).

Reminds me this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schism#/media/File:Christianit...

It would be more difficult these days to get much marketcap on the minority chain, now that Ethereum hosts tokens representing a variety of off-chain resources like fiat money and bitcoins. Those things will have to pick one chain whose claims will be honored. Same for some NFT projects. Anything involving data feeds won't necessarily support the minority chain either, though in principle they could.

This is weird. So NFTs don't do anything? I mean you can always fork ETH and then transfer ownership of all NFTs to yourself on the fork. So basically the value proposition of NFTs is tied to the chain they exist on. It's not the NFT that gives it value, it's the combination of NFT+ETH that gives it value. That's extremely absurd.

Vitalik and friends can just sell their coins on the proof of work chain and thus make it unattractive.

However you could change the protocol / software and block the addresses of people who don't support the PoW chain.

It would be a bit messy.

However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining rig, you would like to do something with your hardware.

> However if you are sitting with a massive ETH mining rig, you would like to do something with your hardware.

You would like to profit from your hardware*.

That's an important distinction, as what make you profit from your hardware, isn't running it on ETH in particular, it's running it on a cryptocurrency which is used. They could run it on ETC currently if they want to keep mining, but they don't as ETH represents more value. So whether they keep running on the fork is more about whether the cash will be there to mine on it and my impression is that it won't be there.

Currently there's quite a big smear campaign on the environment impact of cryptocurrency on the world. This is important for many people, thus will impact whatever they decide to do.

There was also always a preference toward the forks supported by the official developers. It's normal, as long as we have no reason to doubt their decisions, why change? In this case this is even more true as it's not questioning the decision, the intention is clear that it's about the miner hardware.

Let not forget also that this fork will be supported by peoples that proved that they could orchestrate a 51% attack for their own gains... which is pretty much the fear that was always there on cryptocurrencies...

There's no reason to believe people would go toward a fork, thus there won't be much value in mining on that fork versus any alternative cryptocurrency. If I was a miner, I would start selling my graphic cards... they are still sold for quite a bit of money currently and it's just a matter of time before the price crash and it become easy again to buy a new graphic card.

So one can ask. Who has the biggest say in a cryptocurrency?

The owners of the coins, the developers, the miners?

Actually I would argue it would be the exchanges: What the major exchanges choose to trade as Ethereum is what will continue.

It's a big hodge-podge and that's what makes it great.

Ultimately society/the market decides which version is worth more.

Do they have enough ETH to run a 51% attack with a PoS system?

Unlikely as there is an ice age built-in to eth1 which will steadily increase the time between blocks until none are produced. There should also be a hard fork which includes code which just stops the old chain on block x. Anyone that wanted to continue with the old chain would need an additional hard fork.

This will not be the first time this has happened to eth.

They manage to avoid it most of the time via time bombs in the code

Nope, wont happen. https://medium.com/dragonfly-research/ethereum-is-now-unfork...