Back in mid-August, the Ethereum PoW community asserted that a “hard fork is inevitable.” Per the team, efforts were already being put in to make the hard fork a success. As reported back then, the community already disabled the difficulty time bomb, updated the Chain ID to provide replay protection, and completed testnet preparation, thereby putting the plans in the advanced stages.
Read More: Ethereum PoW Community says ‘Hard Fork is Inevitable’
Now, in what is the latest development, the team has announced the official launch date of the fork. Per their recent Twitter thread, the hard fork will take place a day after Ethereum’s Merge materializes. The latter, notably, is all set to happen on 15 September, indicating the former will likely be put to sea on 16 September.
Further elaborating on the same, the Ethereum PoW team tweeted,
“ETHW mainnet will happen within 24 hours after the Merge. 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.”
Notably, the mainnet will start at the block height of the Merge block “plus” 2048 EMPTY blocks. This means the Merge block + 2049 will be the first block on ETHW that may contain any transactions.
Furthermore, the team revealed that the initial mining difficulty will be no lower than ~220 T, or 15 TH/s in terms of hashrate.
Also Read: Largest Ethereum mining pool shows no support for the PoW hard fork
From $18 billion to $0: End of an era on Ethereum
Post the Merge takes place, miners will lose their relevance on the Ethereum network. Last year, Ethereum miners earned $1 billion more than Bitcoin miners. While this year until now, the difference remains the same—with Ethereum miners having an upper hand. Nonetheless, the income number is set to go down to zero post-mid-September. Chalking out the exact figures, Colin Wu tweeted,
ETH miners earned 11 billion, 18 billion, and 2 billion in 2022, 2021, and 2020, compared to 10 billion, 17 billion, and 5 billion for BTC miners. Ethereum miners’ income will likely be reduced to 0 after this week.
Also Read: Post Merge, can Ethereum become a profitable alternative to U.S bonds?