Status as of Wednesday, October 8

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's today's status:

• I still have the problem of the "merkle root incorrect" problem with the dogecoin merge mining submissions. I'll continue to work on this. If I can't resolve this issue tonight, my next step will be to post a 0.2 "bounty" on one of the forums along with the block format to see if someone can point out what's wrong. If that doesn't work, then someone told me about a person who is an "expert" in merge mining, but he would require a higher cost.
• Chris fixed an issue with these forums where sessions were timing out too soon, so now they won't expire for seven days.
• I confirmed that the "all-time balance" column is incorrect, but also confirmed that it does not affect payouts. Therefore, this will be a low priority and may not be fixed for a while, perhaps not even in the merge mining release. I apologize for the inconvenience to those who might be confused.
• The party with earnings is not a fluke. Chris theorizes that someone is purposely trying to prop up the price to execute a "community takeover" of a coin that has been dead for years. He put in a buy order for about a thousand dollars at a ridiculous price. Everyone here is earning about $150/day, so unless he pulls the order, the pool will continue destroying his wall for another week, earning us lots of money.
• This bullet point previously previously listed PoolPicker as being dishonest. However, they did add our pool to the list, so I removed the comment.

[cryptorific]

Just curious if there is anything in place to double check coins for issues such as arbitrary coin generation (like what happened with ghostcoin https://bittrex.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203099464)?

[Chris Sokolowski]

I do my best to spot these issues as they come up, but I also have been working to implement more robust automatic failsafes. We already have Coinwarz implemented to check block numbers, but they don't cover 100% of the coins we offer and they wouldn't have notified us of a network flaw like the Ghostcoin issue.

The ultimate solution I have been working on is to have the site continuously compared with the exchanges and make them do the work to spot these issues. The exchanges do allow you to check the status of the coin markets. In the case of something similar to the Ghostcoin issue, the exchange would disable their market, which we would notice through the API causing us to then stop offering the coin at the pool.

The problem I am having is that Cryptsy requires "approved access" to see this information about the status of their markets. Without this access you conceivably wouldn't know the market was offline and continue to send money to the exchange's wallet without ever being able to trade it. Cryptsy supposedly allows you this access this information if you sign a non-disclosure agreement, but actually getting someone to send you the paperwork is seemingly impossible. I am going to try again today as I have every day this past week to see if I can get someone knowledgeable at Cryptsy to send me the NDA.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi Chris,

This might be a good opportunity to take advantage of Kristof's offer to talk to Cryptsy's representatives over the phone or in person. Perhaps he might have more luck getting in touch with them than you will.

Thanks,

-Steve

[Chris Sokolowski]

What is funny to me about this whole situation is that Paul Vernon, the owner of Cryptsy, was the person to reply to one of my previous support tickets about the NDA request. Of all people I would assume he would know what was going on. But even after he told me whom to contact (nick@cryptsy.com), and I contacted Nick, Nick did not reply.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Doesn't Kristof know Paul? Or was it Charlie who knew him?

[cryptorific]

Charlie said he knew him, but I did want to go down and visit cryptsy and paul, since he's only 30min south of my parents and i regularly go see them. Being more than a ticket number may get better results.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I have a new support ticket sent to Cryptsy and I am going to see what happens within the next 12 hours.

In the meantime, the Elacoin difficulty unexpectedly dropped from 4.8 to 1.8. I believe this is because the difficulty is based upon the time to find the last 2016 blocks, and there were days between blocks before we started mining. Oddly, It seems like we are the only people on the network because the block number doesn't increase when we aren't mining.

Right now I am dealing with managing the pool's hashrate since we are finding blocks so quickly. I have run into a problem where the Elacoin daemon generates an error when I try to send a transaction of more than 30 ELC to the exchange. I have temporally increased the frequency at which ELC is sent to the exchange, but this results in extra transaction fees. Fortunately, since we are the only people on the network, we will mine back all the transaction fees incurred.