Stratum support seems to be going OK. I've had to do a few server restarts to real with merge mining issues on the getwork server but other than that things are working fine. Some better luck would be nice! I have some more tweaks to do on the stratum side of things to make reporting shares more efficient and hope to get that done over the next couple of days.

It should also take into account the number of coins generated in a block. For coins like ppcoin this changes on every block.

A description of stratum is here. It basically provides a more efficient way of receiving and sending work from/to the pool that the 'getwork' and longpoll protocols. For ASIC miners and other very fast devices this will cut down on bandwidth and make more efficient use of their machines. There should be less stales. 

I am testing stratum support. You may see your miner jump to the stratum protocol if it supports the redirection via the X-Stratum header. The server is stratum+tcp://mmpool.bitparking.com:3333. The stratum server is not currently merge mining but it is paying out the alt coin PPS portion from pool reserves. Please post any issues about the stratum usage here.

Remember to set your difficulty for mining by setting your password to "d=8" to set the difficulty to '8'. Change '8' to an integer number for the difficulty you want to mine at. If you don't set the difficulty it will default to 4 on the stratum server.

Withdrawals on bitparking pool are re-enabled and service is back to normal for the exchanges.

bitparking is running 0.7 nodes.

You can still downgrade if you haven't deleted your old blockchain data. If you're not mining though you should probably just shut the node down until the situation is resolved and we know which is the 'one true client' to run. If you're mining solo, mine on a 0.7.2 client. Bitparking is now running 0.7.2.

I've rolled back to an older bitcoin client as suggested by the bitcoin developers and have enabled mining again. Withdrawals are disabled until the issue with the bitcoin blockchain is resolved.

It looks like a wider problem with blockchain forks. All bitparking services are down while this bitcoin issue is investigated.

Pool is down while I investigate an issue with bitcoind not receiving new blocks on the network for the past few hours.

Yes. http://ppcpool.bitparking.com.

The exchange is back up now.

Exchanges are back up now.

PPC pool is up. PPC exchange is down for bitcoind and ppcoind upgrades. Both of which require re-processing the blockchain.

The exchange is down for the bitcoind upgrade to 0.8.0 and the ppcoind upgrade to 0.3.0.

All the bitparking exchanges are down for a bitcoind upgrade to 0.8.0. This is taking a few hours to redo the blockchain. It should be up in an hour or so based on progress so far.

I'm sorry but it's not possible to change withdrawal addresses on the pool. As it states on the registration page: "These addresses cannot be changed once you've accepted the form below. You'll need to register a new userid if you want to change them."

How did you come to no longer owning the existing one? Can you contact the current owner to retrieve the funds? Do you own the private key for the address, and if you do, can you sign a message I give you with it (to recover funds)?

Fees are one benefit. Unfortunately the variance of mining is so extreme that you won't see this benefit for a long time, and in the meantime you'll see such large swings that you'll be wanting a large buffer of your own personal coins to cover it. Thanks to the rising price of bitcoins you can be tens of thousands of dollars down if the short term luck is bad. Or tens of thousands of dollars up if the luck is good of course. And this also depends a lot on the pool payout method. Imagine being 1,000 bitcoins down due to variance, paying PPS, and bitcoins being $50 USD each. Ouch.

Devcoin I can understand. Buying devcoin is essentially a donation to open source developers who receive grants from devcoin. By buying them you increase the exchange rate which enables those developers to get a better price when selling them. I have no idea why ixcoin's are bought. Maybe someone has secret plans for them.

This was due to bitparking temporarily disabling merge mining to track down an issue with a bitcoind upgrade. It has been re-enabled. The difficulty of ixcoin and devcoin are so high they hardly moved from the approximately 36 hour outage so a 51% attack occurring during that time would have required a significant hash rate.

It was interesting to see that Devcoin still chugged along, although slowly, but ixcoin ground to a complete halt. It looks like almost no one other than bitparking is mining ixcoin.