Payout threshold to rise for bitcoin on Sunday, June 19

[Steve Sokolowski]

Greetings!

Recently, bitcoin transaction fees have been rising uncontrollably. The fees are expected to rise above $1 today for confirmation. As a comparison, transaction fees on the bitcoin network are 20 times higher than the fees for the other 200 coins combined, and take (on average) about 35 times as long to confirm. Additionally, the expected 20-block confirmation time is unreliable and even when it does happen, multiple customers have told us that they would mine more often if we had regular payout times.

To reduce these fees by sending fewer transactions, we will be raising the bitcoin payout threshold to $10 beginning on Sunday. The current threshold of $2 will be reduced to $1 for all other coins. Of course, if you still wish to be paid daily, you can always choose the "ignore payout threshold" box on the settings page to pay your portion of the fee for daily payouts. We will use the savings in fees to reduce the expected payout times to 5 blocks in the hopes of improving quality of service.

Also beginning on Sunday, new customers will have Ethereum set as their default payout coin. Existing customers will not be affected and new customers may still add bitcoin as a payout coin on the settings page.

We recommend changing your payout coin to Ethereum or Litecoin, both of which will retain the current threshold and have negligible fees even if you decide to ignore the threshold. Both of these are traded for bitcoins and dollars at major exchanges, and you can retain more bitcoin profit by entering an exchange payout address and then selling the ether or litecoins for "off-chain" bitcoins if you want to hold bitcoins. Changing to one of these coins helps us out by allowing us to reduce our exposure to hackers, since we unfortunately expect to have to secure more bitcoins as a result.

We apologize for the inconvenience this change may cause some miners. Mining is a low-margin business, and hopefully you can understand our need to avoid fees as much as possible. If bitcoin network usage drops in the future, we will reduce the threshold back to that of other coins.

Thanks,

-Steve