09-03-2022, 01:37 PM
The Ethereum merge is approaching and so are rumors about a PoW chain split, make su
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p><strong>First, what is the worst that could happen</strong></p> <p>If you interact on the ETHPoW chain, all your ETH could be taken away. (You are safe if you never interact on the PoW chain and there are precautions you can take to prevent your ETH from being stolen)</p> <p><strong>What is a replay attack</strong></p> <p>A replay attacks is where code can be reused on multiple blockchains. This can be very problematic if the re-used code is you sending ETHP and is re-used to send your ETH away as well </p> <p>It's easiest to explain in an example. ETH AND ETHPoW (which I will now call ETHP) share much of the same code and all of the same history up until the merge. After the merge, let's say Alice wants to send 1 ETHP to Bob, since she sees it as a quick way to make an extra buck from a chain she doesn't see a future in.</p> <p>In order to do this, she creates and signs a transaction with her private key which tells the validators that she approves of the transaction and broadcasts it to the ETHP nodes/miners. The ETHP miners pick up this transaction, quickly process it and Bob has the 1 ETHP in just a few moments.</p> <p>However, Bob, or anyone else, can post that same transaction to the ETH nodes/validators. Since the transaction of 1 coin from Alice's wallet to Bob's wallet is valid and signed by Alice, the transaction will also be processed by the validators. Alice will have lost her ETH without intending to because she didn't account for a replay attack.</p> <p><strong>What can you do?</strong></p> <p>Luckily there are ways to mitigate a replay attack.</p> <p>The most fool-proof way to keep your ETH safe, don't touch the PoW chain. (I'm sure you saw that coming, but you didn't read all this way to hear "don't touch your coins"</p> <p>Here is another thing you can do. Send your ETH to another address you own. Settling up a new wallet or using an existing known secure wallet, or even exchange is all fine.</p> <p>(If you are a slightly more advanced user and know what you are doing and can check the transaction nonce, you can also chose to send the coins back to the same wallet)</p> <p>What is important is that you make a transaction to yourself on the ETH Blockchain (not the ETHP Blockchain and I will explain why later)</p> <p>After the ETH transaction is confirmed, you can then transact from your ETHP wallet without issue. You are safe now because the only transaction that can be replayed is to your own wallet on the ETHP Blockchain.</p> <p>If at any time you notice that your transactions from the ETH chain were re-broadcast to the ETHP chain, stop what you are doing and just leave your ETHP coins untouched. It isn't worth losing your ETH over.</p> <p>If you are an advanced user who sent your ETH to the same wallet, make sure your ETHP transaction has the exact same nonce as your initial ETH transaction so the two cannot be used at the same time.</p> <p>As noted earlier, you should not move your ETHP balance to another wallet and then try to sell your ETHP from the new wallet, because this movement to the fresh wallet and the sending out of this new wallet can both be replayed on the ETH chain.</p> <p><strong>On the practicality of the PoW chain. Will it have value</strong></p> <p>A lot can be said here, but I will keep it to a brief few points. Overall in my opinion the value of the PoW chain is essentially non-existent. There are a few major obstacles that would need to be overcome in order to justify it</p> <ol> <li><p>The ice age and requiring a fork. The ice age is already started. So any PoW chain will need to delay or remove the ice age entirely to have any chance at survival. In practical terms this means that you need to distribute new code to the miners and hope they run your new code after the merge. You won't be able to just get lazy miners who forget to turn off mining to mine on your PoW chain because you <em>need</em> them to run an updated version. IE action is required for them to support a fork</p></li> <li><p>Baggage. Most dapps as well as NFTs and tokens are not planning to support ETHP. This leaves ETHP with all the transaction history that needs to be supported, but none of the benefits. Only ETHP itself could really be relied upon. It would probably be better to start a fresh ETH chain as PoW from scratch or maybe start with the same wallet balances and no other transaction history fo avoid the. Seedless bloat that would otherwise be there.</p></li> <li><p>Replay attacks. This is what the post was about. It's not hard for a developer to add a piece of code to stop replay attacks to the ETHP chain. Bitcoin cash managed to implement replay protection. If this step isn't done, then I wouldn't take the chain seriously. </p></li> <li><p>Miners having something to mine and sell seems to be the main justification for this chain. If it's only use is for people to sell it, then it doesn't deserve to exist for long. Give a real reason why it has reason to exist (and exist over ETC) otherwise, this is just a ploy to make money</p></li> </ol> <p><strong>TLDR</strong></p> <p>Replay attacks allow an attacker to send your ETH when you only meant to send PoW ETH. Your best bet is to simply avoid the PoW chain, but if you want to sell your ETH PoW and don't mind taking some risk, I'd suggest reading the post for mitigation techniques.</p> <p>The value of any PoW ETH chain is dubious at best.</p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/UnrulySasquatch1"> /u/UnrulySasquatch1 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/x438zl/the_ethereum_merge_is_approaching_and_so_are/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/x438zl/the_ethereum_merge_is_approaching_and_so_are/">[comments]</a></span>
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p><strong>First, what is the worst that could happen</strong></p> <p>If you interact on the ETHPoW chain, all your ETH could be taken away. (You are safe if you never interact on the PoW chain and there are precautions you can take to prevent your ETH from being stolen)</p> <p><strong>What is a replay attack</strong></p> <p>A replay attacks is where code can be reused on multiple blockchains. This can be very problematic if the re-used code is you sending ETHP and is re-used to send your ETH away as well </p> <p>It's easiest to explain in an example. ETH AND ETHPoW (which I will now call ETHP) share much of the same code and all of the same history up until the merge. After the merge, let's say Alice wants to send 1 ETHP to Bob, since she sees it as a quick way to make an extra buck from a chain she doesn't see a future in.</p> <p>In order to do this, she creates and signs a transaction with her private key which tells the validators that she approves of the transaction and broadcasts it to the ETHP nodes/miners. The ETHP miners pick up this transaction, quickly process it and Bob has the 1 ETHP in just a few moments.</p> <p>However, Bob, or anyone else, can post that same transaction to the ETH nodes/validators. Since the transaction of 1 coin from Alice's wallet to Bob's wallet is valid and signed by Alice, the transaction will also be processed by the validators. Alice will have lost her ETH without intending to because she didn't account for a replay attack.</p> <p><strong>What can you do?</strong></p> <p>Luckily there are ways to mitigate a replay attack.</p> <p>The most fool-proof way to keep your ETH safe, don't touch the PoW chain. (I'm sure you saw that coming, but you didn't read all this way to hear "don't touch your coins"</p> <p>Here is another thing you can do. Send your ETH to another address you own. Settling up a new wallet or using an existing known secure wallet, or even exchange is all fine.</p> <p>(If you are a slightly more advanced user and know what you are doing and can check the transaction nonce, you can also chose to send the coins back to the same wallet)</p> <p>What is important is that you make a transaction to yourself on the ETH Blockchain (not the ETHP Blockchain and I will explain why later)</p> <p>After the ETH transaction is confirmed, you can then transact from your ETHP wallet without issue. You are safe now because the only transaction that can be replayed is to your own wallet on the ETHP Blockchain.</p> <p>If at any time you notice that your transactions from the ETH chain were re-broadcast to the ETHP chain, stop what you are doing and just leave your ETHP coins untouched. It isn't worth losing your ETH over.</p> <p>If you are an advanced user who sent your ETH to the same wallet, make sure your ETHP transaction has the exact same nonce as your initial ETH transaction so the two cannot be used at the same time.</p> <p>As noted earlier, you should not move your ETHP balance to another wallet and then try to sell your ETHP from the new wallet, because this movement to the fresh wallet and the sending out of this new wallet can both be replayed on the ETH chain.</p> <p><strong>On the practicality of the PoW chain. Will it have value</strong></p> <p>A lot can be said here, but I will keep it to a brief few points. Overall in my opinion the value of the PoW chain is essentially non-existent. There are a few major obstacles that would need to be overcome in order to justify it</p> <ol> <li><p>The ice age and requiring a fork. The ice age is already started. So any PoW chain will need to delay or remove the ice age entirely to have any chance at survival. In practical terms this means that you need to distribute new code to the miners and hope they run your new code after the merge. You won't be able to just get lazy miners who forget to turn off mining to mine on your PoW chain because you <em>need</em> them to run an updated version. IE action is required for them to support a fork</p></li> <li><p>Baggage. Most dapps as well as NFTs and tokens are not planning to support ETHP. This leaves ETHP with all the transaction history that needs to be supported, but none of the benefits. Only ETHP itself could really be relied upon. It would probably be better to start a fresh ETH chain as PoW from scratch or maybe start with the same wallet balances and no other transaction history fo avoid the. Seedless bloat that would otherwise be there.</p></li> <li><p>Replay attacks. This is what the post was about. It's not hard for a developer to add a piece of code to stop replay attacks to the ETHP chain. Bitcoin cash managed to implement replay protection. If this step isn't done, then I wouldn't take the chain seriously. </p></li> <li><p>Miners having something to mine and sell seems to be the main justification for this chain. If it's only use is for people to sell it, then it doesn't deserve to exist for long. Give a real reason why it has reason to exist (and exist over ETC) otherwise, this is just a ploy to make money</p></li> </ol> <p><strong>TLDR</strong></p> <p>Replay attacks allow an attacker to send your ETH when you only meant to send PoW ETH. Your best bet is to simply avoid the PoW chain, but if you want to sell your ETH PoW and don't mind taking some risk, I'd suggest reading the post for mitigation techniques.</p> <p>The value of any PoW ETH chain is dubious at best.</p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> submitted by <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/UnrulySasquatch1"> /u/UnrulySasquatch1 </a> <br/> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/x438zl/the_ethereum_merge_is_approaching_and_so_are/">[link]</a></span> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/x438zl/the_ethereum_merge_is_approaching_and_so_are/">[comments]</a></span>