The users of Slush Pool, a Czech-based bitcoin mining pool accounting for 5.7 percent of hashing power on the Bitcoin network, now have an opportunity to support Bitcoin Classic.

A Slush Pool miner published the following twit: “Hey @BitcoinClassic, can you add @slush_pool to footer of your site as BC supporter?” indicating that they have managed to mine Classic block in their test environment.



Bitcoin Classic proposes a hard-fork solution, alternative to the one offered by Bitcoin Core. It was the first version to provide an increase to 2MB block size and to deliver a working client. The version has gained support of a group of bitcoin players, Xapo and Coinbase being among them.



Still, according to Slush Pool's representatives, their decision should not be seen as a preference towards Bitcoin Classic:

“The pool philosophy is to give our users an opportunity to vote with their hashpower for any reasonable proposal. So Slush Pool supports Core as well as Classic; it is up to our users what version they want.”

Basing on the information provided by BitcoinChain.com, Slush Pool represents less than 6% of the total mining hashpower and, thus, cannot exert a critical impact on the network.

With today’s release of Bitcoin Core 0.12.0 the competition for miners’ dominance is likely to intensify once again.

Anna Lavinskaya