In today's discussion, I will like to talk about Ethereum Classic. I will like to assume that most of you know what Ethereum is but if you do not know, it is just the largest crypto after Bitcoin. You should know that Ethereum has been forked in the past and that is why have the Ethereum classic which is an alternative to Ethereum. You might be surprised that Ethereum was created by a 19-year-old Russian kid. The 19-year-old kid wrote a white paper back in 2013. The white paper entails how the blockchain or rejection will go and in the white paper, the 19-year-old kid stated that Ethereum will be the next generation smart contract.
A simple way to define a smart contract is that it is an agreement written in a bunch of codes, once the code is launched it code not be changed by anyone not even the developer of the code. A smart contract is very useful because it helps us to create a decentralized application. Decentralized applications are very useful because you can do a lot of things with them such as lending coins for interest, transferring coins, and so on. Smart contracts can also automate your transactions and save you the stress of paying your employees.
A decentralized Autonomous Organization is a bunch of people that come together to raise some funds the create a protocol for an Ethereum network this group of people raised about 150 million dollars to develop some certain thing on the Ethereum network profit will be given back to all the investor. What I want to talk about is that the hacker hacked the DAO and steal about 50 million dollars.
You should know that a blockchain contains many different blocks, it stores new data and adds it to the past blocks. When it comes to adding new data to the blockchain in Ethereum, it is transactions that happened and a new smart contract. In other words, when a block is added to the Ethereum network, there will be a new summary in the blockchain and it can never be changed. You should know that one of the advantages of a blockchain is that you can't change anything in the past. Ethereum was hacked and the hacker get away with 50 million dollars, this made the creator of Ethereum create a proposer to add a code into the blockchain that would let the hacker spend the money they stole but first if the majority of the users of the network agree they can add the propose the code into the Ethereum code.
Surprisingly, the hacker of the Ethereum blockchain wrote a letter that he didn't do anything special because he only use a smart contract coupled with a code someone else wrote to steal the money. But Ethereum is here to make sure that people don't do anything immoral on the blockchain. So, what the developer of Ethereum did was to rewind the blockchain to the moment it was hacked and fix the bug on the network as though nothing happened. Even though the Ethereum blockchain experienced a hard fork, people stick to the blockchain and kept adding new blocks to the blockchain because they believe in the idea of decentralization. We now have two blockchains due to the hard fork which are Ethereum Classic and Ethereum.
Sort fork is when the developer won't know to need the user of the blockchain to change anything to be able to use the blockchain to make some changes while Hard Forks require the user of the blockchain to make some little changes to be able to use the blockchain.
If you had any ETH coin whether small or large amount before the DAO hack occurred, you will be having the same amount of coin in both blockchains. Although you might have the same amount of coin the value would be different.
The main Ethereum is hoping to move from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake and this means that people won't need to buy computer parts to mine the coin, they will just stake their coins. The Ethereum 2.0 PoS will need people to stake 32 Ethereum to participate in the network validation while Ethereum classic chooses to stay at PoW.
Ethereum Classic has changed the mining algorithm because it was hacked back in 2019 and 2020. What the hacker did was control more than half of the blockchain to be able to create fake transactions. I believe that you learn something from this topic of the Ethereum Classic.