"Let it be known to the entire world that on July 20th, 2016, at block 1,920,000, we as a community of sovereign individuals stood united by a common vision to continue the original Ethereum blockchain that is truly free from censorship, fraud or third party interference."

With the above words a group of courageous and heroic Ethereum Classic (ETC) and freedom loving individuals broke from the Ethereum community on July 20 2016 by preserving the original, unadulterated blockchain that was founded with the motto "Code Is Law".

Seven years later, ETC is the largest proof of work, smart contracts blockchain in the world and the sixth largest proof of work network overall. ETC is a testament to the true principles and promise of the blockchain industry: Immutability, permissionlessness, censorship resistance, and resilience.

The event that created the separation was called "TheDAO hard fork". In 2016, a dapp on Ethereum had accumulated a large amount of capital but it was hacked. The immediate reaction of the great majority of the community was to revert the chain to return the money to the original investors. But, this would come at a cost: the violation of the key principle of immutability.

This is when the minority raised its voice and said that we must bear the cost to show the world that "Code Is Law" is true and good.

Hence, on July 20 2016, on block 1,920,000 ETC just kept on producing blocks with no changes, but Ethereum, in an irregular state change, moved the funds away from the hacker's account to initiate the process of recovery by TheDAO investors.

So, in this day we feel compelled to say the following:

• Ethereum Classic is the original, immutable chain.
• Proof of work, a fixed monetary policy, programmability, and a philosophy of "Code Is Law" arguably make ETC one of the best, if not the best, blockchain in the world.
• ETC is programmable digital gold.
• ETC is BTC philosophy with ETH technology.
• ETC hosts dapps inside its highly secure environment, thus it is more trust minimized than non-programmable chains.
• The ETC community made the right choice seven years ago.

ETC is hope that we will be able to escape the pressures for great technological centralization in the future.

Resources:

• ETC Declaration of Independence: https://ethereumclassic.org/ETC_Declaration_of_Independence.pdf
• Code Is Law and the Quest for Justice: https://ethereumclassic.org/blog/2016-09-09-code-is-law
• Let’s Keep Ethereum Classic Classic: https://www.ethereumclassicclassic.org

Thank you for reading this article!

To learn more about the ETC Cooperative go to: https://etccooperative.org

To learn more about ETC go to: https://ethereumclassic.org