Status as of Friday, October 17 (it's all about Cryptsy)

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's the unfortunate status as of today:

• The next release is tested, frozen, and ready to go tomorrow morning.
• We now face a different problem. Cryptsy's issues are crashing the pool, causing us to lose money, and they are holding our balances. To make matters worse, they now admit that when they come back online, balances may not be accurate. We can't trade if we can't trust Cryptsy's balances. We probably are down more than 0.5 bitcoins because of them.
• Fortunately, I purchased 2 bitcoins a few weeks back in the case something like this happened. Everyone will still be paid out, and no customer money has been lost.
• We need to make a decision about what to do in regards to Cryptsy's issues, and I'm hoping that some people might offer their advice. Continually shutting down the pool and/or mining 100% litecoins is not a good solution. It's not good customer service, if anything else, to pay people anything other than the maximum they can earn, and mining litecoins is not the maximum that can be earned.
• It may also not be a good solution to simply re-enable Cryptsy once they come back online, because I don't know if we can trust their pricing data. My immediate thought is to temporarily halt operations on Saturday morning when the release comes, and to spend however long it takes to get Poloniex trading working. Since we already have the framework for multiple exchanges available, the remaining work in that area (which has already been started) is to write a class that implements the seven major functions like buy, sell, and withdrawal using Poloniex instead. Payouts would continue on Sunday as expected using our reserve, and then, we could re-enable services on Monday.

Please offer comments about Cryptsy. If anyone has insider information about what is happening, that would be welcome too.

[cryptorific]

According to http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/ ... h_cryptsy/. They're having trouble with their load balancer also "For updates and more info you can find us on Freenode at #Cryptsy"

[Steve Sokolowski]

Thanks. This is extremely frustrating. I understand that all businesses have problems, but these guys are supposed to be a professional exchange that has a money services business license. We can never get in contact with them through customer support and now they are offline for almost an entire day.

It looks like things are coming back now, and we won't have to shut down for a while. It worries me that they could be providing incorrect data, since they said that they are bringing the system back online with incorrect balances. It's hard to depend on an exchange that provides invalid prices and balances.

I wonder if we should axe merge mining for a while and make Poloniex the #1 priority after this release.

[bakedshibe]

I think the best thing to do is try and diversify the exchange situation. Cryptsy has cost me a ton of money over the last year with their terrrible deposit/withdrawl problems and the worst part is they havent done anything to fix it despite making a ton of money off their customers. The only other option I can think of is to have a huge buffer of all the coins we mine and btc on hand but i know that is pretty unrealistic because of the cost involved. It would have been nice to be able to deal with all of this on a smaller scale since we were still in beta and not really in a place to invite 3ghs of mining power to the pool just yet. I dont know who or why someone decided to invite poolpicker to broadcast prohash info while still in beta but i really think that was a dick move with no upside. Somebody always has to be the hero and unfortunately now we are having to try and iron out all the bumps with alot more money on the line.