“Ethereum Classic has always been that stubborn flame in the storm…”— from Why Ethereum Classic Endures
(Local Time: 23,271,745 ETC)
The first thing you notice when you cross into Mordor is the silence.
Not the absence of sound, but the kind that hums beneath the code, the quiet ticking of consensus, the distant rumble of proof-of-work engines grinding away in forgotten nodes. The testnet horizon glows with the faint orange of unconfirmed transactions, each one a spark that never quite becomes a flame.
I came here to remember what it means to build — not for profit, not for applause, but for the principle that computation can be free. Ethereum Classic has always been that stubborn flame in the storm, the last bastion of immutability in a world that prefers revisionism dressed as progress. But even the eternal must evolve, and to evolve we must explore. So I packed my digital saddlebag: a miner’s pick, a few scripts, a wallet with no name, and the conviction that decentralization still matters.
The landscape of Mordor is unforgiving. Forked chains rise like jagged peaks, each promising truth but offering chaos. I pass the ruins of old deployments — contracts lost to time and malformed bytecode, their addresses now nothing more than ghosts in the mempool. Somewhere in the distance, a lonely Safe core contract stands like a watchtower, its bytecode casting a shadow across the uncharted frontier. It will become my anchor, the foundation for the first stronghold: a treasury forged in code and guarded by keys — two of four signatures to open the vault, a fragile covenant of trust.
Mining will fund the mission. There is poetry in that — value emerging from the work itself, not minted by decree but earned by hash. From dust to hash, from effort to coin. The plan is simple: mine the ore, smelt it in the furnace of proof, and pour it into a multisig treasury. From there, we will build a faucet — the wellspring for every traveler who follows, a small mercy in this volcanic wilderness. But the process must remain honest, verifiable, and human. I will place a sentinel in the loop — a GitHub Action that awaits a human’s hand, ensuring that automation does not become abdication.
This record is for the futurists who may walk this path after me.
You will find the ground uneven. Mordor’s RPCs shift like dunes in a storm. Some nodes whisper in deprecated dialects; others pretend to listen but never respond. You will learn patience. You will learn failure. You will learn that decentralization is not a feature — it is a discipline. There will be no comfort here, only the satisfaction of seeing something real persist in a world that forgets.
In time, the Troll Army will rise — not of flesh, but of code. Each troll a daemon, each daemon a keeper of some truth buried in the chain. We will laugh at the absurdity of it all — the notion that meaning can be mined, that purpose can be signed with a key — but we will keep building. Because we must.
So here it begins.
The dust has settled, the hash hums beneath my boots.
The ledger waits to remember me.
Reference Links
Ethereum Classic Community Blog
Mordor Testnet Blockscout Explorer
Core-Geth Client Repository
(End of Entry #000)
Ai stylized notes from Cody on blockchain research