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I recently returned to crypto and know very little of the hard fork and what it all means. I have a wallet that has not been opened in almost 6 months. It contains 7-800 ethers. I want to install a new windows based wallet on another machine. What is the best and safest method to achieve this.

Also, I read something about an Eth classic? what is this about? Do I receive those as well?

Thanks in advance and any help is greatly appreciated!

Scrap'

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Answering your second question...

A few months ago, a very wealthy (in the hundred million dollar range, by a common estimate) contract known as the DAO was drained by an attacker through a bug in the code. After significant debate, the majority of the community decided to alter the rules of the network to transfer the stolen ether to refund the initial investors of the DAO. This was the hard fork.

A significant minority disagreed with this decision, and ran clients which held to the old rules. The end result of this is that the blockchain diverged into two separate and irreconcilable chains (thus the name hard fork.) Ethereum (ETH) is the name for the network that forked, Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the network following the original rules.

If you had ether before the hard fork, you will have the same amount of ETH, plus an equal amount of ETC. That's the good news. The bad news is that any transaction on one network can potentially be duplicated on the other, with often undesirable effects. You'll most likely want to use a splitter contract to separate the two, such that one address holds only ETH, and the other only ETC. ETC is currently over a dollar, so it'll be worth your time to take care of this.

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  • Thank you so much for the useful information! Do you have a link to where I can find the information to do so? Sep 24, 2016 at 1:13
  • This guide goes into detail. Sep 24, 2016 at 13:11

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