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What is Ethereum Classic?
Ethereum classic is an open-source, P2P (peer-to-peer) blockchain network with smart contract features. Philosophical disagreements among Ethereum users led to a fork that gave rise to it in 2015. Despite the contentious nature of its conception, Ethereum Classic has defied all hurdles to become one of the top ten cryptocurrencies. Ethereum classic was founded on the same code that makes up Ethereum. This makes it as valuable as its parent. Its cryptocurrency token or altcoin “classic ether” is used to pay for fees incurred when using dapps and smart contract.
How Ethereum and Ethereum Classic parted ways
The famous DAO attack was the main reason for Schism in the Ethereum community. When the decentralized autonomous organizations was launched, it allowed prospective to invest their money in the upcoming dapps development. The nascent venture collected around $150 million in client money. Later on, a paper was published highlighting a security flaw in DAO’s architecture, but the warning was ignored. DAO was hacked via the same security flaw published, and around $50 million were stolen. This led to a split in the community with one faction supporting the re-writing of the Ethereum source code to revert the hack and the other group refuted the idea claiming that it basically goes against the law of cryptocurrency where files cannot be deleted or edited once validated. Consequently, Ethereum community was forced to fork and those who backed reverting the hack wrote and modified the main code and became the Ethereum community. The main code remained, and users decided to go by Ethereum Classic. Both these blockchain-powered platforms share the same vision and goal of becoming the best computing platform for decentralized apps.
Pros of Ethereum Classic
Allows creation of Decentralized apps – Bitcoin blockchain allows for transaction computing only. Ethereum Classic, on the other hand, is a decentralized computing platform that allows software developers to write dapps whose databases and transaction records can be accessed not only by their respective company but all the computers on this blockchain.
Decentralization – the problem with modern centralized databases is that they have a single point of failure which when attacked or hacked, irreversible harm could happen. With Ethereum Classic’s decentralized blockchain, several nodes share transaction records such that if there is a problem, a comparison of files is done and a discrepancy is revealed and ultimately reversed. This means, any hacker that wishes to part with valuables on this network will have to attack 51% of the nodes to win, which is impossible as it’s a demanding process.
Cons of Ethereum Classic
Struggling to attain a wider acceptance – in the eyes of most market movers, Ethereum (the parent company) looks more promising to them than Ethereum Classic. This has left the latter struggling to gain mainstream usage.
Offers nothing new – Ethereum Classic’s services are a verbatim copy-paste of Ethereum’s. Perhaps if they made efforts to provide a few more services, they would be tailing behind Bitcoin.
Where to buy ETC
Etereum Classic is supported by many major exchanges like LocalBitcoins, Bitquick, Binance, and HitBTC.
Conclusion
All cryptocurrencies experienced substantial growth in 2017 and ETC wasn’t left behind either. Ethereum and Ethereum Classic offer more value than the much raved about Bitcoin. This means these two currencies will be a home to most developers and companies looking to launch new decentralized applications. There is a bright future ahead for ETC.