Status as of Saturday, September 12

[Steve Sokolowski]

Time for a long-needed update on development status:

• Progress on development was temporarily delayed for a few days because we noticed that money was disappearing from the system but could not determine the cause. Chris spent 30 hours researching the problem and was stumped because the system showed absolutely no deviation between actual balances and the database. The only possible remaining problem, he thought, was some unbelievably complicated hacking scheme where several systems were hacked simultaneously and the hacker went to ridiculous lengths to steal a few dollars a day despite there being no evidence of any intrusion.
• In the end, as is usually the case with these sort of situations, the longest investigations lead to the simplest solutions. It turns out that several coins had never been sold. For some reason, an exception in selling had occurred. We can't prevent such exceptions, but we can make sure that the coin goes into an error state and stops mining, which is what I'm going to do today.
• The total of missing money was around $2800. For example, there were millions of CryptoEscudos (https://c-cex.com/?p=cesc-btc), but fortunately the market was deep enough for us to get rid of them all with only a 15% loss. You can see that we made that market third on the entire site yesterday by selling out $1200 in those coins at once. It looks like the market is recovering and we could have waited, but we aren't dissatisfied with our choice to lock in a price at the time.
• Since we never raised fees, and no money actually disappeared, there is no reimbursement necessary to customers. Mining will continue as normal. It turns out that our promised payouts were not too good to be true, and we actually were the best mining pool by a significant margin on those days last week.
• Thanks to the people who offered feature suggestions. I'm going to be responding to them later today after I implement this mining failsafe. I'll also be posting a question about how we should handle payout address security - whether two factor authentication, E-Mail verification, or E-Mail notification is the preferred method.