The Ethereum Classic Founding Documents

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is principles.

The principles of ETC are encoded in the protocol.

The Ethereum Classic founding documents.
The Ethereum Classic founding documents.

To Learn About the Strong Principles of ETC Read These Founding Documents

By the Community – 2016 – “Declaration of Independence

“Let it be known to the entire world that on July 20th, 2016, at block 1,920,000, we as a community of sovereign individuals stood united by a common vision to continue the original Ethereum blockchain that is truly free from censorship, fraud or third party interference. In realizing, that the blockchain represents absolute truth, we stand by it, supporting its immutability and its future. We do not make this declaration lightly, or without forethought to the consequences of our actions.”

By Arvicco – 2016 – “A Crypto-Decentralist Manifesto

“It’s important for anyone participating in blockchain-enabled cooperation to be on an equal footing with everyone else. It doesn’t matter if you wield huge economic power or only a tiny amount. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a saintly Mother Theresa or a vicious drug dealer. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a human or a refrigerator. It doesn’t matter what you believe in, what political theory you subscribe to, or whether you’re a moral or immoral person. A participant’s ethnicity, age, sex, profession, social standing, friends or affiliations, make or model, goals, purposes or intentions — none of this matters to the blockchain even a bit.”

By Arvicco – 2016 – “Code Is Law and the Quest for Justice

“It’s this whole snake’s nest that could be avoided by refusing to be dragged into conflict resolution and quest for justice as related to smart contract execution. And it only requires sticking to principles of blockchain neutrality and immutability.

So, code is law on the blockchain. All executions are final, all transactions are immutable. For everything else, there is a time-tested way to adjudicate legal disputes and carry out the administration of justice. It’s called legal system.”

By Hitchcott – 2021 – “Let’s Keep Ethereum Classic Classic

“Our response to this is that particularly in the case of ETC, pragmatism is downstream of principles. Since day 0 (block 1,920,000), ETC has sold itself on these principles and has attracted its sizable following primarily because of these principles. Many of the developers and contributors working on ETC are only here because of those goals, and have contributed based on this understanding.”

Ethereum Precedents

By Vitalik Buterin – 2013 – “Ethereum White Paper

“However, there is also another, equally important, part to Satoshi’s grand experiment: the concept of a proof of work-based blockchain to allow for public agreement on the order of transactions. Bitcoin as an application can be described as a first-to-file system: if one entity has 50 BTC, and simultaneously sends the same 50 BTC to A and to B, only the transaction that gets confirmed first will process. There is no intrinsic way of determining from two transactions which came earlier, and for decades this stymied the development of decentralized digital currency. Satoshi’s blockchain was the first credible decentralized solution. And now, attention is rapidly starting to shift toward this second part of Bitcoin’s technology, and how the blockchain concept can be used for more than just money.”

By Gavin Wood – 2014 – “Ethereum Yellow Paper

“Dealings in this proposed system would have several attributes not often found in the real world. The incorruptibility of judgement, often difficult to find, comes naturally from a disinterested algorithmic interpreter. Transparency, or being able to see exactly how a state or judgement came about through the transaction log and rules or instructional codes, never happens perfectly in human based systems since natural language is necessarily vague, information is often lacking, and plain old prejudices are
difficult to shake.

Overall, I wish to provide a system such that users can be guaranteed that no matter with which other individuals, systems or organisations they interact, they can do so with absolute confidence in the possible outcomes and how those outcomes might come about.”


If you work or want to work on or for Ethereum Classic, then read them, memorize them, follow them, live them, and be them.


Code Is Law

Author: Donald McIntyre

Read about me here.