Little Jimmy, an Ethereum Classic Story
Little Jimmy and his father were grilling food outside on a summer day. Jimmy’s father told Jimmy to not touch the grill because it is hot and Jimmy would burn his fingers. Jimmy proceeded to touch the hot grill, and as expected, burned his finger and cried in pain.
Jimmy’s experience is a lesson learned event; Knowledge or understanding gained by experience that is significant enough to have a real or assumed impact on the future of Jimmy’s life. After Jimmy burned his finger, he listened to his father more, stopped touching hot grills, and overall became a better version of himself.
Before ETH forked from ETC, there was just one Ethereum. Ethereum Foundation and other groups participated in an ICO. This ICO was a smart contract named TheDAO. Investors sent ETH in exchange for DAO tokens. However, the smart contract had more holes than Swiss cheese, and someone siphoned millions of USD worth of Ether from the smart contract.
In a decentralized blockchain, incompetence is not subsidized. If you send your value to the wrong address, then you are responsible. If you lose your private key, then you are responsible. If your ICO smart contract is not secure, then you are responsible. This action and causation are also lesson learned events. If you store your private key on your phone, but lose your phone, then obviously you must store your private key better.
With digitization we have the privilege to program virtual reality and TheDAO ICO experience resulted in an Ethereum community debate to fork or not to fork. What is now ETH, supported to fork and breached the Ethereum Agreement to bailout DAO ICO investors — ETH Foundation affiliates included. The original chain, ETC, refused to fork and honored the Ethereum Agreement where DAO ICO participants are responsible for their own actions.
What if Little Jimmy could fork or magically remove consequences from touching the grill? Reality is much different than virtual reality because Jimmy felt pain, damaged skin, and has to become the better version of himself to prevent the bad experience again.
Ethereum community largely abandoned ETC at the time and went to the forked ETH chain. That’s where the bailed out capital was after-all. Little Jimmy is an analogy to the driving principles in the ETC community, attracting a community of self ownership and universally preferable principles. Slow and steady wins the race…
Since the DAO ICO bailout fork, ETC has arguably the most organic growth in the space. From a few anonymous developers and independent contributors, ETC now has multiple ETC development teams, proof of good projects with their developers supporting ETC, and more transactions per day than Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Zcash, Monero, and Dogecoin.
