Verge issues this morning

[Steve Sokolowski]

This morning, an issue occurred on the Verge network.

Beginning no later than 7:33:03am EDT, a miner not associated with our pool directed at least 10% of the hashrate of the entire litecoin network at mining Verge. The action continued until no later than 12:14:54pm EDT. Around 8:57, a first long string of blocks was published, orphaning several thousand dollars of our blocks that had been found since 7:33:03. For an unknown reason, the difficulty of Verge fell to 0.0002 at 9:50am, resulting in unreasonable profitability before the system detected the condition and placed the coin into error. That may be a bug in the coin daemon's code.

A few months ago, after similar actions occurred on the Yocoin and Bitconnectcoin networks, I added code to direct the pool's hashrate to attempt to reverse strings of blocks like this, but it currently only does so when the coin is the most profitable. We were able to successfully revert up to four blocks at a time, but because the pool doesn't devote all its hashrate to the coin, we weren't able to revert all the blocks in this case. After Vance is trained, in May, I'm going to finally get around to the "network save" feature that I've been wanting to write since 2015. When finished, the mining servers will continue putting the entire pool's hashrate on a coin where a long chain of blocks appears until that entire chain is reversed. This will be able to pay for itself because it will restore blocks that we and others have earned that would be lost otherwise. Every time a coin appreciates in value and provides good profitability, this sort of activity happens to the coin, and we need to do what we can to put an end to it before Verge or Gamecredits goes the way of Yocoin.

As is our policy, Chris will apply share corrections to reduce today's earnings by 88.8%, which ends up being LTC + 15% for the time period when the Verge profitability was unreasonably high. That is a bonus of about 6% compared to what would have been earned otherwise. Our losses will be about $12,000 for the day. There were no solo mined Verge blocks during that time period, so solo miners earned nothing either way.

We have ceased mining and payouts in Verge until we figure out why the difficulty of Verge dropped to 0.0002, as that could be indicative of a flaw in Verge rather than the "strings of blocks" causing it. We apologize for the inconvenience.