It depends on the intention of the big Chinese farms. If they want, they can kill the ETC easiiy with the hashing power.
Agree. We'll see how far ETC would get in the following months before the year ends. I hope that the team can come up with innovations and solutions towards smart contract security in order to compete against Ethereum. Until now, Ethereum is very flawed suffering from constant DDoS attacks so it might even bring more people into ETC or other ETH clones.
There is one thing though about ETC, and that is about the price decline that has occurred recently making each ETC being worth $0.99 I wonder if this has to do with The DAO dump. How far will the price get will be determined whenever something new and exciting comes up for ETC or not...
Can the ETC developer develop some technologies against the DDoS without doing a hard fork?