Ether Zero: The Hard Fork May Lead to Scams

So far, Ethereum has been spared from too many hard forks. But the Ether Zero hard fork has caused confusion. At one point, it was reported the fork was canceled. But there are still instructions making the rounds on claiming Ether Zero coins.

“How to get ETZ??”

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The promise of the Ether Zero hard fork should be viewed with much skepticism, especially given the risk of losing funds due to exposing private keys. Currently, there is an ETZ/BTC pair being traded on YoBit. The coin even experienced a minor pump-and-dump, with volumes ranging from 1.5 BTC to 50 BTC.

But this is not the most worrisome thing. Right now, MetaMask recognizes one related Ether Zero domain as a phishing danger, although it is unknown whether the threat is legitimate or is due to reporting by users. This may be a case of interested third parties pushing dubious services:

“OMG, THE "BEST" SCAMMER EVER!!!!!!!!!!!! watch out, everyone!”

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It is not unusual to have phishing attempts around the time of hard forks, as it has happened with Bitcoin Gold and other Bitcoin forks.

The team itself has released a roadmap, stating that in the next week, they would be improving the code. A final release of the public code is expected at the end of the month.

Ether Zero offers an almost impossible feat: thousands of transactions per second with zero fees. It is unknown how this could materialize outside of test conditions, as the reality of internet infrastructure severely hampers the real transaction rate.

Ether Zero promises a supply of 194 million coins, 10-second blocks, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and other features that currently no live coin has achieved. At the moment, the main net for Ether Zero is not live yet, and the YoBit trading happens on futures, based on user balances on the exchange. The best approach for now is to store Ethereum in a wallet where there is ownership of the private key.

It remains to be seen whether Ether Zero unrolls a working main net. In the past, Ethereum has seen one other groundless fork, Ethereum Vega. The project was attacked for attempting to grab a registered brand, as the Ethereum name is protected by the Ethereum foundation, unlike the name of Bitcoin, which has not seen any claims to exclusivity. However, Ethereum Vega turned out to be a false alarm, and nothing more was heard of the project since last fall.