Status as of Wednesday, January 11, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi,

Here's a few updates:

[*]Chris discovered an issue with the mining server that caused some coins to be in an unnecessary error condition. The cause was related to some sort of SSL version changes from Bittrex. I was not able to figure out how to fix the problem, but I worked around it by removing the error condition. Since we will be abandoning the scrypt-only fork soon, I didn't want to spend much time on it. Chris believes that profitability will increase as a result of the change, which is effective immediately.

[*]The Bitcoin network has seen increased fees and delayed confirmation times, as has been happening due to the congestion there. Beginning now, we will unfortunately be doubling the Bitcoin payout threshold, because fees have now increased to more than $1.50 per transaction. You can still be paid at lower amounts by checking "ignore payout threshold;" however, payouts worth less than about 5 cents are no longer able to be paid, and you can expect to lose fees of 5 cents with "ignore payout threshold."

[*]Additionally, we have set our fee target at six blocks to save money. We will still meet our goal of executing payouts the day after they are owed, but the time of day when they confirm will be even more variable than it was before. If you need to be paid immediately, we suggest Litecoin or ETH, which tend to be paid in the morning and confirm within a few minutes with low fees.

[*]Charlie Lee is attempting to implement Segregated Witness on Litecoin. We are calling for comment on whether we should support the feature or not. Please provide your comments in response to this post. Chris will be contacting the miners who find the most litecoin blocks for their opinion in person. My initial thought on this issue is that Segregated Witness is not the best solution for the blocksize problem, and in Bitcoin the push for larger blocks has begun to gain significant momentum at 16%. I worry that Segregated Witness activating on Litecoin would set a precedent that it would be OK for Bitcoin miners to activate it and do nothing else. Miners here who get paid in Bitcoin can see the fragile state of the Bitcoin network, and I get the feeling that this is a critical juncture where these sort of decisions are not just about Litecoin anymore and the entire industry is in jeopardy. Therefore, my personal preference is a compromise position of "Segregated Witness is OK if and only if a permanent blocksize solution is also included." We'll see what customers think.

[*]Multiple algorithms is going well. I estimate less than one weekend of development time before testing begins. We are on target for the original release schedule of February. We are awaiting the approval of a new credit card we can use to get discounts on solid state disks for our parallel test system.

[CritterDog]

I support Segregated Witness