Quote from: Grix on January 16, 2016, 06:30:29 AM

Just a warning. I just asked a question in the eligius thread, and the owner of seems completely out of touch with the current happenings in bitcoin, namely the forking issues. He refuses to answer questions on whether he would follow the most popular chain in the event that a hardfork occurs, and banned me from his thread after I pressed him, because it's a very simple yet extremely important question to answer. Very worrisome behavior. I fear he is liable to mine on the original chain even if the majority switches, out of spite at what he adamantly calls "altcoins", jeopardizing his user's money. If you value your money I wouldn't mine there, especially if a hardfork begins to seem likely in the near future.

It may be a wise decision by the pool operator. Note the fact that the parameters chosen by at least two of the current forks, "Classic" and "XT", are specifically chosen to ensure a very small majority will eventually trigger the fork. Even a lucky minority can do it. I think a pool operator refusing to take the risk of making a premature decision is only doing his job. See this explanation by organofcorti from long before "Classic" was conceived. The evenly distributed hashrate between the forks means it may take weeks to discover which fork is the most popular. It would be best to use this time wisely, as miners may announce false support for a fork, and stay on the standard bitcoin chain when it is time to switch. A variant of this happened after the BIP66 soft fork, which was triggered on a 95% majority, resulting in a long chainfork which took hours to resolve.

Most miners will probably leave due to unprofitability when the price crashes on the uncertainty surrounding the fork. How this sudden drop in hashrate will change the support for the different forks is completely unpredictable, but must be taken into account when choosing which fork to mine. If the "Classic", "XT" or "Unlimited" fork is chosen, and the real majority ends up following the old consensus rules, all work done on the forks may be lost.

I wish the forkers were more responsible when choosing their parameters. Either they don't know better, or their goal is drama and destruction, not change. If they think an economic majority want larger blocks, they could launch a sidechain with 2 MB blocks, and see most bitcoins moved over there. This sidechain would become the de-facto bitcoin chain with no harm to Bitcoin, and larger sidechains would be easy to deploy when needed or wanted.