Status as of Sunday, June 4, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's a brief announcement:

• After talking with Chris last night, we concluded that the target date for SHA-256 mining will be July 16, exactly 3 months and 13 Sundays after x11 mining was released. The timing will coincide with the user-activated soft fork, and will allow us to hopefully be one of the first pools to make profit by switching between the two forks.
• The reasoning for the SHA-256 date is that it allows for enough time for me to increase the performance of the mining server further, and to resolve a few of the remaining issues with the API and the mining server first. Chris will begin installing SHA-256 coins in 2 weeks, so 175 new payout coins will become available over the coming weeks.
• We do not expect major issues with SHA-256 mining's release. X11 mining was a key turning point in the business, because the software had to be redesigned to handle multiple algorithms. The code for SHA-256 mining already exists, so while there may be one or two initial issues due to something different with production compared to development, we don't expect widespread disruptions. The major risk for disruption is if SHA-256 mining causes a large increase in customers or if performance causes an orphaned bitcoin block, which is why I will continue to focus on performance over the next weeks.
• Finally, before we get to SHA-256, I want to add in per-miner electricity usage. The current electricity usage is flawed in that many users bring different miners on and off all the time.

[GregoryGHarding]

any news on moving away from BTC as main currency and switching to LTC. i know you mentioned it X amount of status updates awhile ago. haven't heard anything about it since.

[Steve Sokolowski]

any news on moving away from BTC as main currency and switching to LTC. i know you mentioned it X amount of status updates awhile ago. haven't heard anything about it since.

We haven't gotten around to that yet, because we're fixing other bugs.

The system can support it, but it's a huge amount of risk because we've never tried to do it in production and the amount of money lost due to downtime in the case of a catastrophe would far exceed the transaction fee losses.