There’s an episode of the cartoon Rick and Morty in which they stop time to clean up the house after a big party. Because of a little bit of doubt in their minds when they restart time, it causes a break in time, in which they are all living two versions of themselves in two separate timelines.

It feels like the cartoon has come to life in the form of ethereum’s two chains.

The day the fork happened I was hanging with Matt and Martin from Gnosis. I mentioned I had a gut feeling there was a meta-attack on ethereum that wasn’t obvious, but that I wasn’t really sure what it was. When I saw Ethereum Classic, I initially laughed it off. But upon being added to Poloniex things got a bit real. I realized this was the meta-attack I had been sensing possible.

The thing is though - I’m not against it. Within any system you have the ability to talk or to leave, these principles are generally called “voice” and “exit”. My suggestion previously had been people who didn’t feel heard to go back to bitcoin, but this is an interesting alternative.

The one thing that I will note, however, is that I still feel that the most toxic elements of the cryptocurrency space have found something to rally around. Browsing the /r/EthereumClassic subreddit is like looking into a black pit of aggression and fear. It feels like what the Ethereum community would have looked like if it had initially been created by Donald Trump supporters.

I’m not sure there’s enough information to know whether this will be the death of the ETC community, or its ultimate strength. It’s not clear if it will result in an ultimate failure in the form of a pump and dump, or an infusion of ideological blood that the ethereum ecosystem didn’t have before. It might even save bitcoin and ethereum by giving the trolls something constructive to do with their time.

The weird thing is, anyone who was economically linked to ETH’s success now has, by default, their bet hedged on two chains, and as someone who loves hedging bets, this isn’t really something I’m mad about.

Don’t get me wrong. I still think the Ethereum Classic are a bunch of assholes with personality disorders who may ultimately self-destruct. But I’m not mad about ETC. Godspeed.