Status as of Monday, October 13

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 9:15 am

Here's the status of development as of Monday, October 13:

The next release has been scheduled for Saturday morning, October 18, around 8:00am EDT. The pool will need to go down for anywhere between a few minutes and an hour. The goal of this release is to put out the bugfixes we have, and to deploy the infrastructure that supports multiple exchanges and merge mining. Those two things will be able to turned on with little effort once they are working.
Merge mining is unlikely to be in this release, as I spent another 20 hours this weekend and was not able to get past the issue I've been stuck with for a total of 65 hours now. My next task will be to rewrite some portions of the dogecoin daemon to get more debug output, or I may put up a $500 reward to actually implement merge mining in some similar software.
The Elacoin market keeps going strong, for some reason. Every time we beat it down to 3000, someone puts in a buy order at 5000. When we burn through an order, another buy wall usually comes back later. As far as I can tell, we seem to be the only people actually selling Elacoins. Our biggest problem is that when we stop mining them, the blockchain does not advance, so the algorithm needs to predict 100 blocks ahead what the market conditions will be like, since when the market crashes we can't sell our blocks because nobody mines the chain forward.
There have been numerous requests for static difficulty settings. I'm going to take a risk and add that feature to Saturday's release.
Chris is forming a limited liability partnership today, so he will have less time to do the technical work for a day or two.
Yesterday, there was one 1.31 bitcoins paid out, and 1.31 litecoins paid out. I wonder if the new option to "ignore payout threshold," which will become available on Saturday, will cause more people to get paid in other coins.
There is an issue with passwords where the length of the login box is limited to 32 characters, while the change password fields are unlimited, making it impossible to log in if you set your password longer than 32 characters. For now, use a password shorter than 32 characters. The issue is fixed in Saturday's release.
Yesterday, we (the pool, not miners) lost about $30, mostly because we spent an hour mining litecoins and did not find any blocks.