Few mining pools have provoked as much resentment and outright anger as GHash. When the CEX.io-owned pool crossed 51% of the total bitcoin network hashrate last month, it did more than crash the price – it made many in the bitcoin community realize that the dreaded “51% attack” scenario wasn’t as implausible as some experts had claimed.
With this in mind, shareholder-owned mining collective PetaMine decided it might be time to point their 1.2 PH/s of hashing power away from GHash. Last week, PetaMine’s administrators announced the results of a survey seeking shareholder input on moving towards decentralized mining pool P2Pool, selecting another pool to join, or staying with GHash.
The results couldn’t have been more clear. With 68% of unit holders responding, 96% voted in favor of switching to P2Pool. A mere 3% voted in favor of staying with GHash, even though staying with the larger pool would mean their profits would be substantially less erratic on a daily basis.
PetaMine has since moved forward with their P2Pool adoption, although a compatibility problem with BitFury systems has caused some delays.