CSZiggy wrote:Personally, in the past year I went from running 30 machines down to just 2, so you lost 28 of my miners. Electricity costs more than they make and I don't mine at a negative HOPING the prices come back up before tax season. The crash in November pretty much killed my business last year.
Its less of a business and more of a way to heat a few rooms in my house now. On the plus side I made a ton of money 2 years ago, and the latest round of machines I bought with that all got ROI, but I didn't make over ROI, just broke even. With no foreseeable increase or profit for what I am guessing to be the next 2 years, I am less enthusiastic about mining or cryptocurrency. IF prices bounce back up in another 2 years, if the machines aren't all obsolete or difficulty not crept up so high as to become unprofitable I look forward to switching them all back on and making some $.
Until then....not worth the hassle, taxes, tracking coins, paying short term-long term, the extra costs, invested money that may never be seen again.
Other issue, as Mr. Trump pointed out, the USD is just too damned strong. If I lived in Denmark and was mining coins and getting paid out in Krones I could be paying 4X more in electricity and still be making profits.
Another criteria to look at, not sure if possible, check IPs of incoming miners for country of origin codes? Proxy and VPN not withstanding, maybe there is a trend globally....less chinese miners mining abroad in some type of hinted-forced country wide policy to not profit foreign pools/exchanges for instance. Or if electric costs have doubled in England maybe half the lost miners came from there? Anything regional that might explain the decreased hashs?
I think that you're misunderstanding what the issue is.
It does make sense that you personally, as well as many people in general, decided to stop mining because of lower prices. That said, the bitcoin network hashrate has risen during that same period of time. That means that even though you stopped mining, someone else started mining in your place.
We would expect the pool's hashrate to fall as the entire market contracts, and it did. But now that that contraction has ended, and bitcoin network hashrate has started to rise again, SHA-256 hashrate here has declined dramatically, especially within the past week. That's despite our increasing relative profitability and fixing bugs.
For scrypt, our hashrate has declined at about the same rate as that of litecoinpool.org's, which means that we have maintained about the same share of customers. When prices of litecoins rose again, our hashrate actually increased more than litecoinpool.org's. But that isn't the case for SHA-256. That could imply there is a bug in our system we don't know about, that there is some change in mining hardware we don't know about, or that some new pool that I haven't been able to find launched with a compelling feature. In all of these cases, once the problem is identified, we can work hard and address the issue.
While I agree with the other comments that we can add new coins, and we plan to do so, shouldn't the loss of payout coins affect all algorithms equally? That's why I'm still of the opinion that something specific occurred, within the past 10 days, that changed conditions for SHA-256.
