There are people who say that Ethereum Classic is the real Ethereum. The reason is that both used to be one project with one community until a hack, the DAO hack that split the community into Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. The DAO was to revolutionize the blockchain. During their initial coin offering, a hacker hacked the DAO platform and made away with $50 million of investors’ funds. The Ethereum community could not reach a consensus on how to handle the hack. Some members were of the opinion that the hacked funds should be refunded the investors. To do this, it would be necessary to fork the blockchain and isolate the stolen funds. This was against the ideology that transactions on the blockchain are immutable.
The differences created within the community led to the split. Those in support of returning the stolen funds through a hard fork migrated to the new chain and it retained the name Ethereum. Those that maintained that transactions on the platform must remain immutable remained with the original platform but renamed it Ethereum Classic.
Main Features
Ethereum Classic is a decentralized peer-to-peer platform based on the blockchain technology. It has code similar to Ethereum and is a Turing Complete machine. It is capable of executing smart contracts and have dapps built on it. The internal currency of ETC is classic ether. It is used for the payment of goods and services on the Ethereum Classic platform. Since it has similar code to ETH, initial coin offerings can be hosted on it.
Founded in 2015, the coin has a maximum supply of 230 million ETC. Presently, there are 101 million coins in supply even as the coin is valued much lower than Ethereum. Despite that, Ethereum Classic is still a very viable coin to invest in.
How it is Different from Bitcoin
The uniqueness of Ethereum Classic is that it was built to run smart contracts and have decentralized applications built on it. This is unlike Bitcoin that is meant just to be a decentralized peer to peer cryptocurrency used in making payments and having them recorded on the ledger. We can say that Ethereum Classic is both a payment platform and a building platform on which dapps and smart contracts could run.
Where to get it
Nearly every exchange would trade and sell the classic ether. Binance, Poloniex, Bittrex, etc. It is one of the more popular coins.
Where to Store it
Classic Ether Wallets are meant to store classic ether. Other wallets that can be used in storing it are MyEtherWallet, Mist and Ethereum Parity Wallets.In using Mist, be sure that it is downloaded from the right Github repository.