Slush Pool along with other mining pools such as Bixin, will not support Bitcoin Cash and its Aug. 1 hard fork execution.
Initially created by Bitmain, Bitcoin Cash, formerly known as Bitcoin ABC, is a hard fork that is being developed and launched by a few mining pools led by ViaBTC. It aims to mine 8 MB blocks, which are eight times larger than that of Bitcoin, and will maintain a network without the implementation of the Bitcoin Core development team’s transaction malleability fix and scaling solution Segregated Witness (SegWit).
Cointelegraph reported in an article entitled “Bitmain: Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Merely Contingency Plan for UASF” that not even Bitmain, the original creator of Bitcoin Cash, is sure whether the company will support the ViaBTC-led Bitcoin Cash hard fork or not.
“Merely a contingency plan”
In an official blog post, Bitmain revealed that the company created Bitcoin ABC as merely a contingency plan towards Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP 148, meaning that the company was only going to activate or pursue the activation of Bitcoin ABC if BIP 148 had been activated.
But, Bitmain terminated its plan to activate Bitcoin ABC after BIP 148 had been avoided and the mining community, businesses, users, investors and traders came to a consensus to activate SegWit via BIP 141, the original SegWit proposal. Analysts explained BIP 91 and BIP 141 as the last opportunity for the mining community to avoid a chain split and the mining community agreed to activate it. With the except for ViaBTC, which had different plans from the beginning.
To understand as to why leading mining pools including Slush Pool and Bixin will not be supporting the Aug. 1 hard fork of ViaBTC and Bitcoin Cash, it is important to note that there were two driving factors of BIP 141 SegWit activation. These are BIP 141 user-activated soft fork (UASF) and SegWit2x, a proposal introduced by the Digital Currency Group-led consortium of 86 companies.
Bitmain, ViaBTC and the majority of the mining community agreed to SegWit2x and to activate SegWit and to increase the Bitcoin block size to 2 MB thereafter. However, despite agreeing to activate SegWit2x and SegWit with the industry and mining community, it pursued the execution of a hard fork in Bitcoin Cash, which the Bitcoin industry and some miners have already rejected.
Alternative, not Bitcoin
Cointelegraph further emphasized in its latest report that the Aug. 1 hard fork will have a minimal impact on the Bitcoin network, primarily because the vast majority of the industry perceives Bitcoin Cash as an alternative cryptocurrency and not as Bitcoin.
In fact, on July 28, Coinbase, the largest wallet operator and a major Bitcoin exchange operator, announced that it does not intend to interact with the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain.
In addition, Slush Pool announced:
“We want to let you know, that we currently have no plans to support the emerging Bitcoin hard fork called Bitcoin Cash (BCC) scheduled for the Aug. 1st, 12:20 UTC. As for now, we do not see a real demand from miners and the costs of creating and maintaining separate Bitcoin Cash infrastructure would be too high.”