We live in interesting times indeed. Today everyone who has a little time on their hands can make considerable profit on the cryptocurrency market and the returns on the investment definitely make the whole endeavour worthwhile. The only thing that you actually need, in addition to a bit of cash put aside, is to research the main coins that are currently available on the market – surely, when it consists of more than 1100 cryptocurrencies, it is quite impossible to be acquainted in detail with all of them. Ethereum Classic is one of those important coins that it would be a good thing to keep an eye on in the months to come.

Ethereum Classic, or ETC

Created through a hard fork from the all-so-popular Ethereum, Ethereum Classic is, much like its counterpart, a blockchain based, open source, public platform that actually features smart contract (scripting). Prior to the fork that we have had the chance to mention, the platform was simply known as Ethereum. After the initial fork in 2016, the new tokens created continued to be referred to as Ethereum (ETH), while the old ones were given the name Ethereum Classic (ETC). The main reason for the division was the disagreement with the Ethereum Foundation in regard to the DAO Hard Fork – members of the community simply did not agree with the fork on philosophical grounds, which actually is a clear indication of the beauty of the whole cryptocurrency open-source world.

A little more background and timeline

This is basically how things went down:

• The Ethereum Genesis block was released on July 30 2015
• The introduction of the EIP-2, EIP-7, and EIP-8 into the second major release of the Ethereum platform took place on March 14 2016
• First Fork and the creation of ETC took place on October 26 2016
• The unlimited cap token transmission was changed to a fixed one like bitcoin on December 11 2017

Pros and cons of the Ethereum Classic

So, when investing, the main question is whether to go for ETC or the new ETH. This is a question which answer depends entirely on the investor themselves and their respective plans and strategies, but it will do no harm to point out  to a few of the pros and cons of ETC. First and foremost, Ethereum Classic stays true to the original philosophy of this particular cryptocurrency, which is based on the immobility of the blockchain. Another big news for everyone who thinks about investing in it is that several big players in recent months actually gave their backing to ETC. The problem remains that there are known scammers in the community and that new updates to the Ethereum blockchain do not reach ETH.

How to avoid scams

The only fool-proof way to make sure that your investments in ETC is to find a reliable and regulated broker through which to make your transactions. When making your decisions you should first check out whether or not the broker/platform you are considering is regulated. Client support, as well as wealth of account and trading options are other important factors that need to be weighed in. It basically all comes down to the fact that nothing good can come out of it all if you do not do your research carefully.