This will appear on Snapshot on Sunday, September 4th.
FOR: Disable the Bancor contracts on a PoW fork (trading, adding and removing liquidity)
AGAINST: Do nothing in the event of a PoW fork
TLDR:
The Merge is coming on September 15th
Miners have indicated they may create a proof-of-work fork
The Bancor DAO should determine its course of action in the event of a fork
Overview
The Ethereum migration to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, “The Merge,” is coming on approximately September 15th. The current status can be seen here: Mainnet ETH Merge Countdown. More information about The Merge and how it relates to Bancor can be found in this post: Analysis of Bancor & The Merge
A faction of Ethereum miners have indicated that they will create an Ethereum proof-of-work fork. This initiative appears to be an attempt for miners to squeeze additional value out of their mining equipment. While there may be some level of activity on the proof-of-work chain, the vast majority of users, developers, and protocols will continue with the proof-of-stake chain.
Course of Action
The end result of this is the necessity to make a decision on whether the Bancor DAO should disable the contracts on a proof-of-work fork, or do nothing. Below I’ve outlined the main arguments for each option.
Disabling Contracts
This option would include disabling all Bancor platform functions on an Ethereum fork. This option should incur little to no risk. The main argument for this is that most tokens on a proof of work fork will quickly become worthless, which would result in the Bancor platform being drained of any value that could be extracted on the forked chain.
Do Nothing
This option would be to do nothing in the event of an Ethereum fork. This would incur no risk to Bancor on Ethereum Mainnet, however, any value that could potentially be extracted from an Ethereum fork would be quickly lost.
I think this proposal needs to be modified and switch so that the DAO is voting on whether to support the POW chain or not. The canonical chain (POS chain) is essentially what the Ethereum community by large consensus will support and also officially supported by the Ethereum foundation. In essence, one can think of it as the official successor to the current Ethereum proof of work chain going forward. The Bancor protocol continuing to function on the POS chain is essentially continuing its current operations.
The current proposal as it stands (if it fails) should not dictate that Bancor will not support the official canonical (POS) chain.
PoS is the default chain which is fully supported by ethereum foundation and a long list of reputable projects (Bancor is one of which).
the vote should be about PoW fork which might be a reality (not sure if this will actually happen).
as a result of the merge, the network will be duplicated and a state will exist on PoW.
this unwanted duplication, should either be let alone and let the market possibly abuse it OR disabled and freeze.
I agree. The proposal should be similar to voting on deploying Bancor contracts in a new chain, in this case, Ethereum PoW. Ethereum PoS is the de facto chain after the merge happens.
Given the feedback, I’ll be editing the proposal to reflect that supporting the status quo (PoS chain) involves doing nothing & therefore should not require a vote.
The followup question is what this should be a vote for:
IF (and this is a big speculative question) ethereum miners would decide to maintain a PoW fork, everything that exists on the chain would be doubled.
in order for it to become “another token”, it requires some gateway/bridge that can support the transfer of PoW tokens to PoS chain.
the assumption is that only centralized exchanges will handle such option and will NOT allow trading of PoW to PoS tokens.