What is the purpose of having an identical bitcoin copy? It would be nice if the price was also identical, but I would like to know the main purpose of this coin ?
IXC is not an exact copy of Bitcoin - there are some modest changes that make for a different purpose and use cases. Originally IXC was an exact clone with a much faster mining - mined out before 2014. This was intended to test the idea that fees could carry a coin. Became obvious the fees would be too small - so merge mining was added to drastically reduce the payout needed to be viable - and to claim a green label.
Ok we know how that worked out but the coin stayed alive with a modest dev team.
Recent changes include a donated mining fund - each block now pays 1 IXC as long as there are donated funds available to mining fund - so far about 500K donated/committed. Additionally, block size has been increased to 64MB which should also lead to a fee payout per block which should attract miners with use cases having fees of a fraction of a $.01.
The current idea is to leverage merge mining to provide atomic transactions and micro/mini transactions in a software package nearly the same as bitcoin.