Its the old chain of ETH which means half or probably more than half of the people who believed in ETH back then had forked it and resulted to ETC, it still support smart contract and way better than ETH actually its just that only few developers looked into it. But for a price like $16, its still very young and could be more than a hundred in few years.
If I was given the choice of only selecting a coin between ETH and ETC and no other coin I will select ETC not only the smaller market cap gives to it the chance of growing faster than ETH but I also agree in principle with the posture of ETC, some time ago there was an ico called The DAO but there was a hack and there was the question about how to deal with the hack, there were those that wanted to return the funds to their rightful owners, this is the chain followed by ETH and while that seems fair that violates the principle of immutability of the blockchain, because if you do that then what it is stopping you from reversing any transaction that you want and so ETC forked with the blockchain intact.