In 2016, a $150 million crypto dream collapsed, splitting Ethereum’s soul. The platform was raw, brimming with vision: unstoppable code, trustless governance, a world reshaped by contracts beyond human override. Then came The DAO, a community-curated investment fund on Ethereum’s blockchain, which in weeks amassed over 150 million dollars’ worth of ETH, marking the largest crowdfunding effort of its time. The idea was bold, the architecture elegant, the security assumptions naive. An attacker exploited the contract’s logic, recursively draining funds not by breaking Ethereum, but by following its rules precisely.
The Ethereum Foundation faced a defining choice: restore the stolen funds by altering the chain’s history, or uphold immutability and let the theft stand. The community fractured. What followed was a hard fork, technically incompatible with the past, politically and philosophically irreconcilable. Ethereum, the dominant branch, rewrote history to recover the funds. Ethereum Classic stayed with the original chain, its scars preserved, committed to the belief that code is law, and no authority, not even its creators, should erase events etched in the ledger.
Today many see Ethereum Classic as a relic, the lesser heir eclipsed by progress. Yet at the moment of divergence, the future was unclear. Some argued Ethereum’s credibility required accepting failure without intervention, preserving the sanctity of an unalterable chain. Others believed that immutability without exception was dogmatic rigidity, and justice sometimes demanded reversal. Both sides believed they safeguarded Ethereum’s essence. Time alone decided which grew richer.
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