I've mentioned this a lot of times but I'll repeat myself to make sure you really get it: Ethereum Classic is nothing more than a investor made decision that the ethereum community should be split into two. The opinion was backed by many investors and miners who didn't want their ethers stolen due to the DAO attack which happened in June 2016.
Some people wanted to give them away for free while others would have rather agreed with soft or hard fork in order not to divide ethereum community in half. Every single person who held ETH balance during the fork on block 1920000 got the same amount of ETC coins at the current market price.
Every single person who held ETH before June 2016 which is not more than 14280 - 200000 blocks got nothing. ETC operates on a blockchain that is exactly identical to Ethereum's public chain. It offers an cryptographically verifiable proof-of-work consensus.
The primary goal of Ethereum Classic is to use smart contract functionality to create a blockchain platform which allows developers to build decentralized applications and services, as opposed to other existing platforms such as Bitcoin or Nxt.
Ethereumclassic has been developed from a separate blockchain, because unlike its competitors it has not introduced changes through any major hard forks since going live in July 2015.
Both this system and code are considered unimpeachable by developers, who have signed agreements to write good code. In consequence, many dApp programmers are looking to Ethereum Classic as a platform for future development. The current ETC market cap is $1,147,746,851 and the average daily trading volume of Ethereum Classic is $263,740,000.
What you need to know at this point is that ethereum classic community decided not to implement changes through any major hard forks, which is why it's technically identical to the Ethereum (ETH).This means that for everyone who held ETH balance during the fork on block 1920000 got an ETC coin in ratio of 1:1.
Ethereum Classic is the only Ethereum fork which managed to survive without any changes to its system. Most other major forks like ETH/ETC, BTG, EOS...etc got their coins listed on multiple exchanges but not ETC.
Even Forkdelta(a decentralized ethereum token exchange) which is the biggest ethereum token exchange by volume has no ETC trading pairs. Rumor has it that Coinbase didn't want to list Ethereum Classic because of its low popularity and forking out of an already existing blockchain which was not profitable at all.
So far ETC developers have introduced two hard forks on their blockchain, the first one occured at block 5 million and it was aimed at fixing the so called "Difficulty Bomb" which is a piece of code that increases mining difficulty exponentially with every new block.
This means that after some time it will be almost impossible for miners to mine new blocks. It was planned in the Ethereum Foundation's roadmap but since ETC is a community run blockchain, they decided to make changes to their blockchain at block 5 million which didn't go well with many people in the ethereum community.
The second hard fork happened much later at block 12,000,000 and it was aimed at recovering the 3.3 million ETC which were stolen by a hacker that managed to exploit a smart contract vulnerability on the Ethereum network.
