Status as of Tuesday, October 14
Posted: Tue Oct 14, 2014 9:28 am
Here's a short update as of this morning:
- The rising bitcoin price is killing us. Because we are mining difficult coins some of the time, we need to hold a reserve, but previously our reserve is in dollars. We realized last night that if we didn't buy several bitcoins as a reserve, then we might end up with a huge debt should the next bubble begin soon. I told Chris to buy two, since a litecoin block is worth 0.6 bitcoins and that will cover us except unless we are 1 in 1000 unlucky.
- I successfully implemented static difficulties. In the next release, you'll be able to enter a password of d=X, where 512 <= X <= 65536. If you don't enter a password, then the current algorithm that optimizes difficulty will be used, with a small change: the maximum difficulty will be changed to 16384 to reduce bandwidth usage. Some ASICs don't like a difficulty that high, but people who have a problem can manually configure difficulty. This difficulty will be available on a per-unit basis, so you can configure a huge block of units all with different difficulties.
- We will freeze the code tomorrow or Wednesday in preparation for Saturday's release.