What Is ETHW and Ethereum Hardforks
Hard forks on blockchains are pretty rare these days. Back in 2010 to about 2018 hard forks where all the crazy. People invested to a main asset and would hard fork it and "airdrop" tokens to wallet holders in an effort to build a new token.
Some of these most notable ones that stuck around in some form are Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold and Ethereum classic. These all support older or alternate developments on their own blockchains but were birthed from the core blockchain that started them all. This shouldn't be looked as a negative thing. At the time crypto was new and with it came many unknowns, ideas and alternative ways of doing things. If a group of miners or developers didn't agree they would split off the chain.
Ethereum PoS
Ethereum moving to PoS or Proof Of Stake means all miners with millions if not billions invested into power, buildings and GPUs will instantly become useless. While they could go mine another GPU heavy crypto the chances are that wont happen because the simply put the profit and capital are not there to support it.
This has some miners fighting back but for the most part in general it feels a large majority support this move and it's only a few investment cry babies that made the poor decision to keep building GPU miners that are crying about it. Times change people!
Ethereum Classic
Ethereum classic was born out of what was known as the "beta" days of Ethereum. It's when a error in the code of the chain allowed for millions (what would be billions today) be mined by a few wallets. This error could only be reset via a hardfork in which Ethereum (ETH) now has. ETC has the error in it or the wallets that took advantage of this.
ETHW
ETHW is a potential hard fork of Ethereum and came with the successful final test of the Ethereum move to proof of stake after the Goerli Merger. This made it clear that the final merge would take place mid September and with that would spawn a hard fork from miners who wanted no part of it.
That hard fork is currently known as ETHW. ETHW was first released on exchange Poloniex on August 8th. It was then follow up listed on exchanges Huobi, BitMEX and Bitrue. It's important to note however this thing doesn't even really exist. It's what's considered a IOU by the exchange I Owe You. When Ethereum moves to Proof Of Stake this hardfork called ETHW would be the new token that supports the old Proof of Work Method over the new Proof of Stake method.
It begs the question if hard forks will be much of a thing after this after the SEC attacks all crypto exchanges and everything moves to decentralized systems anyways.
Currently that presale of that token is down drastically. Since listing it posted over $100 a token and has crashed over 50% in recent weeks. However it's something to keep an eye on but in theory it's expect to collapse and most likely will turn up being a hobby ETHClassic like token.
That's mainly because you're taking the billions of dollars in miners and making them mine a token that has zero value currently in it. These miners sell their newly printed tokens to cover costs of power, rent on buildings etc. With only a few million in market cap that would be sucked dry in a day or two.
What are your thoughts. Will ETHW and the proof of work blockchain remain and hold some weight in the new crypto economy or will it crash and burn?