Is the move away from GHash.io to unknown (solo) really surprising, is it a big deal?
The thing is, there is no incentive for miners to move away from GHash.io and it is a systemic problem. But if GHash.io didn't play fair and starting being evil, I bet they would instantly lose much of their hashrate, since most of it is external (i.e. not cloud mining)
Really? Control of the mining power is no big deal, eh. What exactly would the consequences be of a hard fork to Bitcoin? How much faith would be lost in Bitcoin and its dev team? Would it maintain its top spot in crypto money land? GHash has already used its hashing power to attack a gambling site that accepted 0-confirm transactions. LukeJr, that piece of Jesus freak crap, has already used the Eligius pool to attack CoiledCoin. This problem needs to be solved once and for all so that no pool operator has the power to do anything to Bitcoin.