Status as of Sunday, August 5, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• The system will be offline for up to 30 minutes tomorrow while we release charity mining, tipping, and a number of related features. This represents a major overhaul to the codebase and will require all services to be restarted. Once everything comes back online, we will run the system without any of the new features enabled for a day, and then provide some charities for donations on Tuesday. You'll also be able to tip Constance and Vance by Wednesday, and we expect to be able to have more coins for Coinbase payouts within a month.
• Bitcoin payouts are on indefinite hold because the Bitcoin Core client began performing a database upgrade when it was restarted with version 0.16.2. Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do except to allow the database update to finish; the daemon can only go as fast as the solid state disks allow. Money has been sent to the client's wallet, but it won't be able to send the payouts because it hasn't yet scanned the inputs into the wallet, which are in blocks above 535,000. The daemon is currently at 509,540, so with 25,000 blocks to go at 1 block every 2 seconds, we should be able to issue payouts at 4:00am EDT tomorrow. However, the latest blocks tend to be more full than previous blocks, so the scanning may slow down. We also can't mine bitcoins until the latest blocks are scanned. Both mining and payouts will automatically resume immediately with no action from us once the conversion has completed.