whats happening on slash pool is the voting for bigger blocks size .
That's what I thought at first too. But if you look at the pool stats this whale is not pointed at the BIP101 port. And it is a whale, since it's got over 12 PH/s.
Is it a XT port or a BIP101 port? Because those arent the same thing. At all.
I don't think it's easy to tell which ports folks are using on Slush. The one hint I have found is under the "Pool Statisitics" tab is a chart with PH rate graphs broken out with BIP101 as one of the labels. I don't see an XT labeled line. My simplistic understanding is that SLUSH is essentially "labeling" blocks according to which pool you use. I think that BIP101 is the moniker that he's using at this time, but the whole XT/BIP101/Blocksize fiasco is terribly confusing for most folks. It's quite possible I have this wrong, as I expect about 90% of the miners in the world do.
Yes it is horribly confusing. Because many confuse XT with BIP100 or BIP101, they thing "Oh they all bring block increase so its all the same and finally there's actual code that was released that could do it! Wowe!" and they miss the whole fact XT include non related code as well.
Only the BIP101 part of XT would cause a hardfork. So from the pool's perspective it makes sense to vote for/against that specific BIP, whether it's implemented in XT or in Core.
I understand why they're classed together then, but i wouldn't personally. I'd say XT is a step worser.
But anyways, i think avoiding the hard fork way is the way to go. With a strict implemention of BIP100, i think we would be better off.
I hope Bitmain will feel that way too, since with their size, they can basically prevent it from happening since i think BIP100 would need over 75% of block for 10 days strait?
BIP100 would need a hard fork too. It has a different way of adjusting the block size - 90% majority, continuous voting by pools.
BIP101 is the one that needs 75% and it's looking at the last 1000 blocks (~7 days), starting in January. There is no voting after that, block size set to 8MB then doubles every 2 years.
The whole thing is mostly political. I'm guessing big pools would prefer BIP100 as they could wield influence with voting. For the little guy BIP101 with its predictable schedule works fine.
Anyway, this is getting off topic, sorry.