Status as of Saturday, April 15, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! It's a shame to be inside when temperatures have crossed 70 degrees (21C) for the first time, but there's lots of work to do today.

Tomorrow, we are going to do something that, when you think about it for a minute, is extremely stupid. We're going to take down a system that is successfully processing $20,000/day in mining and replace it with unproven software, using new hardware. We know that such releases have a 100% chance of having some sort of problem because there are so many different types of mining equipment that we can't test all of it, and we can only hope that the problems are minor. It would make a lot more sense to leave things as they are. But the Middlecoin pool left things as they were in 2014, and the number of people who remembers them is exactly three - the two of us and the owner of the pool, which disappeared because competitors quickly exceeded their featureset.

• Thanks to Chris, who was able to complete our taxes yesterday on schedule, after about 60 hours of work. We filed about 300 pages of documents to 14 different agencies. We were pleasantly surprised that less work was required than anticipated, that FinCEN paperwork was not yet required, and that business expenses lowered our burden to $10k. We'll be less pleased to find out how much it costs next year.
• As a side note about taxes, Chris told me that in many countries, the government simply sends citizens a notice telling them how much they owe, and you can just pay and be done with it. Why isn't that true everywhere?
• As another side note about taxes, some have sent messages suggesting we hire an accountant to do them for us. If you think it's difficult to explain bitcoins to your family, try explaining the business model of a profit-switching mining pool to an accountant, and then giving them 1.3TB of data to compute the numbers. No accountants know how to do it, which is why we had to do it ourselves.
• We had good luck with Litecoins yesterday, which caused the SegWit signaling to decline temporarily. I'm going to see if I can do something even more stupid - try to shoehorn SegWit into this x11 release, despite my not having a good understanding of it and the Litecoin developers having reneged on their promises and provided no help whatsoever. I have no idea how SegWit affects merge mining.
  I'll write it so that we can simply turn it off should we start getting lost blocks. We will test it on Viacoin first, and if after a few hours there are no lost blocks, we'll enable it on Litecoin next.
• beta.prohashing.com is going offline now to reclaim resources for the release. The subdomain will be removed and final payouts will be transferred to the current system. Thanks to those who helped out.
• We are going to target 10AM EDT as the shutdown time tomorrow, although we could be off by an hour or two. If you have a backup pool set, then you should fail over automatically.

I'll post a status report on Sunday night with a list of bugs and their status.

[Steve Sokolowski]

I'm pretty confident that we will be able to deploy SegWit tomorrow along with this release.

It turned out that it took 8 hours to get the Litecoin testnet working, because of a bug in the Litecoin client. It only took 1 hour to get SegWit working after that. It shows that configuration is often more difficult than actually writing code.

I'm waiting for someone to validate that block 36310 on the testnet is indeed a SegWit block, and if so, then it will be in tomorrow's release.

[JKDReaper]

As another side note about taxes, some have sent messages suggesting we hire an accountant to do them for us. If you think it's difficult to explain bitcoins to your family, try explaining the business model of a profit-switching mining pool to an accountant, and then giving them 1.3TB of data to compute the numbers. No accountants know how to do it, which is why we had to do it ourselves.

As a CPA myself running my own firm and just beginning to understand the cryptosystem, I can say with confidence you are probably right and IF you could find one who understood it, paying them for the time involved in TBs of data would bankrupt you lol. My hats off to you for doing it on your own!

And on the subject of the government sending your tax bill...concept is great, implementation impossible with current tax system. You'd over pay DRASTICALLY due to all the loopholes and such that even many IRS officials I speak to daily don't understand...and I am a FIRM supporter of the solution to this...simplify the tax code! Would put me out of business of course, but this system is in dire need of an overhaul! I'm rambling lol, but again, hats off to ya!

[lightcoin_fan]

I'm pretty confident that we will be able to deploy SegWit tomorrow along with this release.

It turned out that it took 8 hours to get the Litecoin testnet working, because of a bug in the Litecoin client. It only took 1 hour to get SegWit working after that. It shows that configuration is often more difficult than actually writing code.

I'm waiting for someone to validate that block 36310 on the testnet is indeed a SegWit block, and if so, then it will be in tomorrow's release.

Thanks for supporting Litecoin, the LTC community, and for deploying SegWit Steve. Great work