Ethereum Classic bears some resemblance to Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork of Bitcoin. Like its counterpart, Ethereum Classic was birthed as a result of different schools of thought of the community members.
It was 2016, and an app on the Ethereum blockchain had suffered a massive hack, which changed the course of history. As a result of the hack, millions were stolen, and the team felt that there was a need to curtail this. Amongst the Ethereum community, two sides were created after the theft of Ether. The first side felt that a hard fork was needed to solve this crucial issue, but the other side felt that the opposite was the case.
Ethereum went with the thoughts of the first party, as a hard fork was implemented in the chain, and those that had lost their Ether were refunded. This hard fork removed the hack from the ledger. The second party refused to go with the hard fork, instead, they continued with the original ledger that had not erased the hack. They felt that removing the hack was going against the basic principles of blockchain, which was immutability. To those that toed the lane, they felt that reverse or altering the ledger in the chain will bring distrust into the Ethereum community.
With the hard fork, two separate blockchains were birthed with different ledgers. The first one, which is the altered variation is called, Ethereum, while its unaltered counterpart was christened, Ethereum Classic. As for the former, it doesn’t have a record of any disruption in the ecosystem, and the latter does. This is the major disparity between both blockchains.
The origin of the hard fork occurred when The DAO, a third-party app on Ethereum, was hacked and millions of ETH were stolen in 2016. Some factions on the appropriate method the hack should have been handled crept up.
The Results Of A Hard Fork
As earlier mentioned, Ethereum is not the only blockchain that has faced hard forks, which led to the original chain getting divided into two independent chains. A fork may occur when a community is split into different parts with varying ideologies. To settle the issue, a fork is done, which creates separate chains. This is what happened in the case of Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. In other scenarios, a fork could be done to incorporate innovations into the blockchain.
The Two Factions And Their Arguments
After the hack occurred, community members came together to think of ways to handle it. It was paramount that those that had lost their Ether holdings had to be repaid. Most agreed on this, but the bone of contention was if the hacking incident should be left on the ledger or not. Those that were on the side of Ethereum blockchain felt that blocking out this bad historical event was needed if the chain would survive.
To do this, the developers carried out a hard fork that reversed the hack, which made the stolen funds return to the Ethereum chain. Implementing the hard fork birthed a new ledger that retained the Ethereum name. As for the original ledger, it was given another name, Ethereum Classic. Both blockchains are independent of each other. Many of the victims of the hack felt that Ethereum was better than Ethereum Classic.
A second faction felt that staying faithful to the original ledger was crucial to the survival of the chain. To them, editing the chain when an issue reared up went against the philosophy of immutability. If a blockchain could be edited whenever some people wanted, why then was it classified as immutable? Blockchain Idealists feel that the foundation of blockchain is destroyed when human manipulation is allowed.
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