19 Tuesday March 2024

Ethereum Classic

Ethereum Classic: What Is So Different From The Original Ethereum?

Ethereum Classic is a hard fork of the original currency-Ethereum and it is a copy of it in almost every single aspect. Ethereum Classic has the same blockchain, so it most likely can do everything that Ethereum can.

A large part of the crypto community stands behind and is strongly supporting the original Ethereum blockchain because they firmly believe in the ‘’code is law’’ rule. However, the statement released by the Ethereum Classic community also stands behind this philosophy and claims that there will be no changes made to the Ethereum Classic code that violate the sanctity of the ledger, so transaction history cannot be reversed or modified. Despite many investors sticking with Ethereum for ideological reasons, Classic also gained a lot of followers because of the many development projects such as the Emerald Software Developer Kit. This kit can be used for building decentralized apps. They also implemented smart contracts.

However, some crypto exchanges only support Ethereum and don’t have trading pairs for Ethereum Classic. But plenty other exchanges allow you do trade Ethereum Classic such as Binance and Bitfinex. Also, using crypto wallets is different. Some popular hardware wallets do support both, but others are not interchangeable. Wallets that support both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic are Jaxx and Ledger.

How Was The Altcoin Created?

Back in 2016, the venture capital fund named The DAO built on Ethereum managed to raise to $168 million to invest in smart contract platforms and projects. During the same time, the white paper was released with all of the security vulnerabilities that the DAO has which could allow ether to be stolen. In June, 3.6 million Ether was taken from the accounts in the DAO and moved to other accounts without the owners’ consent which showed the vulnerability that was outlined a month before. The members of the DAO and the Ethereum community debated what to do next and how to resolve the situation. One vote occurred in July and it was decided that a hard fork should be implemented in the Ethereum code and to move the Ether token to exploit new smart contracts which it would be restored to the owners from whom it was taken.

Ethereum Classic came into existence when some of the members of the Ethereum community rejected the hard fork because of ‘’immutability’’ which is a principle that the blockchain cannot change and then decided to keep using the unforked version of Ethereum. The first ETC block that was not included in the forked ethereum chain was the block with the number 1,920,000 which was created by the Classic miners on July 20, 2016.
Ethereum Classic went through a technical hard fork to adjust the internal pricing for running multiple opcodes on the Ethereum Virtual Machine which is similar to the hard fork of the ETH chain which happened just a week earlier. The goal was to price the compute-intensive and external reference commands to reduce the incentive for future spammers who had conducted a distributed denial-of-service attack on the Ethereum Classic network. The hard fork that happened in 2017 managed to delay the so-called ‘’ difficulty bomb’’ which was added to the Ethereum code in 2015 to increase the difficulty of the mining.

The people who continued to work with Ethereum Classic, advocate for the blockchain immutability and the ‘’code is law’’ concept which was against the pro-fork side that argued for extra protocol intentionality, conflict resolution, and decentralized decision-making. On June 29, 2017, the Ethereum Classic Twitter account made a public statement that the website for the wallet has been compromised and worked with CloudFare to put up a warning on the compromised domain.

Is It Profitable?

If you are wondering what gives the ETC its value, there is no correct answer to that. However, it does have value because people who believe in the project and those who support it, invest in it so the altcoin gets listed on exchanges. Since Ethereum Classic is a clone of Ethereum, the holders of the altcoin can now make money by making an account on the Ethereum classic version of the blockchain and can also duplicate their balance. As ETC is a replica of the original blockchain, everyone who had the tokens on Ethereum at the time of the hard fork now has the same amount of Ethereum Classic tokens and this is free money for the traders.

However, this has caused big problems for the exchanges because they didn’t want to list ether classic tokens and they ended up holding tokens that could have been customers’ funds anyway simply by possessing the ether tokens at the time of the split. Major exchanges have picked up the alternative of the coin and made it possible to trade ETH for ETC. Poloniex was the first exchange to do so. There have also been opportunities to make a profit by switching between currencies.

What’s Ethereum Got To Do With It?

The craze that went around Ethereum classic could fizzle out the same way Bitcoin Classic did. There could even be two ethereum’s that will continue to develop along but end up in different paths into the future. For now, one of them has the functionality that Ethereum is supposed to deliver which is mainly based on the smart contracts. Ethereum itself is also impacted because some of the users and miners are staying on the old chain and are lowering down the number of total users and network security.

Conclusion

Now that Ethereum Classic exists, the community has plenty of questions including whether hard forking the blockchain or merely rewriting the code to reverse the transactions without the consensus is worth the risk. It is still not clear whether the rise of Ethereum classic is a bad thing for the blockchain technology because it could give the minority a chance to build their own system in the future.

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