The Chinese mining pool that earlier threatened to break up with the Bitcoin Consensus has started testing Bitcoin Classic mining. The decision comes as the Core Vs Classic argument is heating up.

The F2Pool's action was noticed and revealed by Jihan Wu, Co-founder of the Chinese bitcoin mining ASIC provider, in its twitter post. The explanation followed from F2Pool that they were testing Bitcoin Classic mining only at a special testing port (stratum.f2xtpool.com:3333) and currently are “not going to run Classic node in production, for the ‘foreseeable’ future,” in accordance with the Consensus agreement achieved in Hong Kong on 21 February.

That means that F2Pool users are not allowed to mine Classic for real because F2Pool software is Core-powered.

The F2Pool's decision has caused heated discussions on specialised forums and in Twitter, where supporters of Core and Classic versions are respectively condemning or admiring the Chinese mining pool’s conduct. One of the prominent F2Pool's supporters is Brian Armstrong, Co-Founder and CEO of Coinbase, the exchange that preferred to back the Bitcoin Classic solution and the immediate increase of the maximum bitcoin block size to 2 MB.

“This is how all pools should operate. Let people vote! [...] Also, helps decentralise mining a bit more.”

The opposite opinion was spoken out by the developers Matt Corallo and Peter Todd, who attended Hong Kong meeting 21 February and signed the roadmap on the Segregated Witness implementation. Commenting in the Bitmain's official twitter on the topic, Corallo wrote:

“That’s a shame. I hope at least Bitmain will honor the agreement we all signed less than a week ago.”

According to Peter Todd, “giving individual hashers a voice is admirable, but doing so via false nVersion settings is dangerous; use the coinbase instead.”

Earlier F2Pool urged Adam Back, President of Blockstream, to explain why he had changed his position title in the road map signature from “president” to “individual”. The Chinese mining pool claimed they would withdraw support for the SegWit agreement. Later Back changed back his signature to President of Blockstream in the list of roadmap signatories.(edited)  

Elena Platonova