The Ethereum Hard Fork & Ethereum Classic

       The Ethereum Hard-Fork  went as smoothly as possible. The event took place at Jul-20-2016  01:20:40 PM UTC and it was received quite well by the community,  according to the price charts.  

Ethereum kept rising  hours before the  Hard-Fork and it kept on doing so after. No bugs or complications were  brought up and the hacker, whose identity is still unknown, has been  left empty-handed… On the new side of the fork at least. 

        A small group within the Ethereum community has stayed on the old  side of the fork with their own duplicate blockchain. This project is  called Ethereum Classic and it promises to keep the ecosystem  decentralized and free from censorship. 

        This is a contradictory view to some, in the sense that Ethereum Classic has kept their own set of rules despite the  consensus of the community, which is the exact opposite of what  decentralized and censorship-free means. The project gained traction,  none the less, with two mining pools dedicated to classic miners. 

        Bitshares, a decentralized cryptocurrency  exchange, has also added the ETHC coin for trading. This may be  problematic and confusing to users, who may end up sending coins from  the classic blockchain to a deposit address meant for the Ethereum  chain. 

        Classic team members hope that the difficulty will drop within the  next day bringing the blockchain to a sustainable level, and the block  time back to a 14-second average. Many argue that this feat may not be  accomplished due to the lack of miners on the classic blockchain. Will exchanges add this “new ethereum”?  Will developers build on it? Ethereum based cryptocurrencies like Shift,  Expanse and Krypton can also be seen as an “alternative” to Ethereum as  they provide the same features, they do not reward the DAO hacker (as  ETHC does) when gaining value and they have different communities and  different developers. The Ethereum project is open source and  anyone can clone it with the changes they deem necessary, without the  need to subject unaware users to lose funds or to mine on the wrong  blockchain by accident.