Our civilization grew up (well, still a baby, but "grew up" sounds better) from the art of written communications and the specialization of professions (the useful ones are mostly related to science and technical knowledge).

'''Clearing systems ("money" or "currencies" in everyday language) made specialization (and therefore our civilization) possible.

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Small currencies (often in the form of coupons, vouchers, or clearing between a few parties) have been around since ages. Transactions can be initiated in several ways

* crypto

** allows a third party to verify that transaction originated from the authorized party (very important in the long run)

* or naive (non-crypto). The primitive way (fundamentally flawed) that does NOT allow third party to verify transaction was really authorized

** the traditional banking system and visa/mastercard uses this type

How the transactional information is stored:

* centralized (stellar, ripplepay)

** the "title server" farm is controlled by a central authority

** even if distributed geographically, still an easy target for the establishment to tear down at will compromising transactional freedom and causing serious technical and psychological concerns (tear down eg. via regulations, DNS or DOS or IP level attacks or floods, bribery, violence or silent poisons, seize, or cruise missiles - human history is full of wars fought for who issues money, and all these have happened several times.

** for these reasons we did NOT dare to promote centralized services (we might not be alive now)

* distributed

** bitcoin is historical

** [ethereum.org] allows more currencies, is more efficient

One might notice that [coinmarketcap] grows several percent each day (which means that people investing random gain more than if they could in any bank or share)

* Warning: when sum of market cap grows beyond 2000 billion dollars, inflation (evaporation of value) of the traditional (EUR, USD, ...) monetary supply follows (similar have happened several times in history, eg. silver => gold and vice versa)

* warning2: the establishment always stirred violence (war, terror) in those times

** only careful evaluation of the situation (technology, psychological and other aspects) can help to

* warning3: email (see StupidMailTransferProtocol ), wikipedia and facebook might not work as expected (even this wiki might be censored, perhaps hijacked by adversary. although small players are less likely to get compromised than big parties with lotsof audience - like TV, radio, wikipedia)

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* Bitcoin burns (in a distributed way) the full power production of a nuclear power station (yes, in the order of GWatt ) to do appr 20 transactions /second

** it is extremely inefficient, but clearly historical anyway (to prove in practice that decentralized title-server is possible)

There are multiple ways to make transactions without the extreme environment pollution of sha256 hashing (bitcoin, ethereum) and the fragility of centralized title-server farm (stellar, ripple).

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Ethereum classic ETC (not to be confused with electronic throttle control)

When it was first advertised to pay with ethereum (for VEMS ECU, recommending to buy some extra, which allows negative purchase price in the end after ether monetizes, which happened more spectalularly than envisioned), there was only 1 branch, called ether (which is now called Ether classic).

While bitcoin only allows keeping track of bitcoin balance (an extremely limited system), Ethereum allows keeping track of ether balance OR ANY information and processing via any (deployed contract) algorithm automatically, a truly generic and practical system.

* yes, "any information" is quite strong, but transactions are still not very inexpensive (should be < $0.01 ) and somewhat environmentally polluting (mining executing much more than should be required for data and transaction safety)

** transactions for an average webshop payment are 100..1000 times more expensive via Visa Mastercard than with ETC or ETH

** and Visa/Mastercard explicitely admits in the contract that the Visa/Mastercard system simply cannot secure transactions (as stupid as it sounds: that would be it's only single task and it just cannot do that !);

** ETC or ETH payments are secure and guaranteed

*** the only way to disrupt them is to shut down the internet, or sg. equivalent

**** eg. to restrict to facebook, google, and a few thousand or millions of servers (that must not get involved in direct or indirect transmission of crypted financial transactional data, and monitored for such activity).

**** steganography could help, but ETC or ETH are simply NOT prepared for steganography

**** clearly, it's a nontrivial situation. Most people only notice that terror (and/or war) is stirred (by the establishement they pay their taxes to, and the bank they traditionally ask to create money for them by growing the money supply - misleadingly called lending or loan). Media mass manipulation has never been so advanced and successful as today. (yes, as it stands now, history will consider our generation the most stupid and manipulated generation, that makes the same mistakes as in 1920-1930, repeating the same mistakes of blaming certain class of people, despite all the available crypto-communication technology that could be used to do otherwise)

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ETC Ethereum classic is the chain as it was ment, adhering to the ethereum principles.

ETH Ethereum is a hijacked (hard-forked) chain (with a modified sourcecode in effect after certain blocknr, which violates the basic principles: "creating applications that CANNOT be shut down"

* interestingly the ethereum developers made the hijack intentionally, to prevent the meltdown of a giant, and seriously flawed contract, the "DAO".

** it was not an inherent flaw in ethereum; Just because ethereum virtual machine is a generic purpose computing machine, smart and bad, or even stupid things can be executed in it (the DAO was stupid in concept, and it was coded without sufficient care).

** noone was forced to participate in the DAO, but more than 10% did so (mostly ethereum developers who got IMMENSE amount of ethers for the - relatively small but important - work, but also external parties who worked more for the same or less amount of etheres.)

Since any smart contract can be executed on the ETC chain (except that ETC balances are affected, not ETH balances), and ETC chain transaction cost (gas price) is lower (in USD),

the ETH (ethereum.org "official" lost it's purpose of executing smart contracts. (but note: the official ethereum ETH is more monetized at this time; basically it works as an improved bitcoin; there is some chance that it might gain another 2x and it could easily outgrow bitcoin market capitalization; hard to predict but likely).

Still, the stupid DAO story seems like a happy ending:

* proved that even the "official" Ethereum group (Vitalik, and many smart guys btw) who started it, cannot shut down the Ethereum classic, it works as it was ment in the first place

* confidence++ in the system. The fact that both chains survived is a victory for crypto currencies (even if it might upset many of the official Ethereum guys, the opinions differ though)