Topic: Do you care about which "fork" the pool you mine has chosen? (Read 664 times)

Generally I think that miners tend to consider their profits and the popularity of the pool more than the affiliation of the pool.  The pool/company on the other hand usually makes the decision based on what they think will gain them the most profit in the long term, or in the case of the more principled pools, what they think is best for the Bitcoin network (and often these two things will be related).

However I think that miners should have a little bit of principle here, because there are several pools of similar specs which have different affiliations and it should not be a problem for miners to swap between them.

In my experience the vast majority of miners choose whatever is giving them the most current profit or whatever they chose when they first started mining through minimal understanding of the difference between pools, choice based on size, language issues or wherever the hardware was preconfigured to mine. Those that are selective about their mining pool would mine on it even if it was mining something not bitcoin, provided it was earning them more profit. Saying that miners are choosing the direction bitcoin will take, be it segwit, BU, something else, or core unchanged, is a lie. The reality is that pool owners are choosing. Very few miners are making a choice based on what the pool runs or is signalling. Many probably don't even know what their pool is running, and are not even fully informed about the differences. Look at what antpool signalling BU has done to the network and confidence... and they did it only in protest against the User Activated Soft Fork movement, but as a result the BU signalling% on the network now looks like triple what it was.

Let's face it, mining is meant to be a profit venture so can you blame them? Of course mining on a pool that ends up being disruptive, detrimental or even just holding back progress of the network long term means less long term value to bitcoin and consequently less profit, but that equation is hard to quantify and what to choose to do is often not clear due to massive mudslinging matches. Seeing more bitcoin in your wallet after mining short term is easy to quantify.

Segwit, BU, what ever. Do you follow or



Would you change pool to back your opinion or profit driven only?