Oh boy.  I have been heads down on some things, and look at the thread :-)

You guys have to realize that it is just me, a one man team behind this coin right now.  I am the brains and the dev, but I also need cash flow to live.  I was full time on crypto stuff for a bit, but its not panning out as well as I would have hoped, so I need to focus my time occasionally on making real money to pay for normal life things ;-)

No, I am not manic-depressive   I am just busy, and lately I have been doing some paid services for others to generate some revenue.

At one point in time, we had a group of people focused on marketing/graphics/etc. but even then we were unable to really rally folks to contribute.  So, it falls on me to do, which is fine but as a result the time lines start to draw out.  That does not mean that it is abandoned, it simply means that you have one resource filling 5 or 6 roles.  We have this thread, as well as the particle forum, social media etc.  The community could take advantage of those resources to promote the coin, build services around it, build media and videos, roadmap the direction the community would like to see the coin go in, etc.

I have a few more big ideas for the "PRTX" (or whatever name we go with) PoS coin, a few things that nobody has thought of doing yet, but I am sitting on it because I have noticed a few other coins are trying to do a few things that we are planning to do (like retail PoS interfaces).  For me my long term goal would be to be able to earn fees on services around Particle, just like building up a portfolio of cash-flowing rental properties etc.  So my time horizon for building this stretches out over the course of a year, not short term news for pumps and hype.  So that is where I am at.  I have been heads down on some things, and I have been testing "new-coin" whether we go with ParticleX or some other branding.  Particle2?

What I will commit to is to try to do weekly updates in the way that the PeerCoin team does.

Yes, you are right

I think the concern was over how open ended it would be.  The swap is done by sending your PRT to a special PRT exodus address.  A script then sends PRTX back to your PRTX address.  Have to write up all the details, but essentially your address stays the same, you export/import your private key from old to new and we run a bot that does the swap.  On the one hand having a deadline would make sure unclaimed coins aren't just sitting out there forever, on the other it is an issue for folks who are long term holding and don't check up on news or run the wallet very often so they might miss a broadcast message.  The Exodus addresses will be public and trackable so I don't think we have to worry about unclaimed coins disappearing into the ether.  I think we will be able to do this pretty smoothly.

Alright guys, I have to apologize for going "dark" again for the last week or two.  I had a problem with the provider for the pool server, I secured the server and in the process their monitoring tools can't connect - so what did it do?  It rebooted the server repeatedly.  So I have been working on repairing it and will get it up and going again shortly.  I have done some payouts over the past week but there are still a lot in the backlog, those will go out tonight.  Thank you for your exceptional patience! (and remember, I do these entirely manually by cutting and pasting from a bunch of Excel spreadsheets!)

In bigger news...

We are going to reinvent Particle as a Proof-of-Stake coin called Particle X.  This time I want to have the background and supporting materials ready to go before we pull the trigger, but here are some details:

Particle X will be a Proof of Stake coin with X11.  There will be a 2 week period of PoW mining before it becomes pure PoS.

I am leaning towards 250M total coins.  The coins will be split.  175M of Particle X coins will be mined and reserved for a coin swap for PRT (just like Saturncoin did, with an Exodus address that we can track and a script to automatically do the swap), at a 4:1 ratio.  The remainder will be PoW mined on the pool.    We could also consider doing half and half, with 350M total coins.

I think having another PoW phase is important to generate some publicity and community interest again and get the miner's more active.

Particle X will have a 5 minute PoS modifier interval and the same fast transaction processing that we enjoy with PRT today.

I am leaning towards 3%/year proof of stake but I am open to suggestions from you.

I'm working on a lot of stuff and it is a little overwhelming for one person, I will give it a few days before I finalize the code for PRTX and am happy to consider suggestions for the parameters.  What we want is a coin that is fast, attractive, with a good long term economic model, that builds value for the investors and doesn't erode it, and that I can use as a platform to build all of these great things on top of it like Particle Shares (yes, that site is complete and will go live with PRTX).

What does PRTX mean for the android wallet?  Proof of stake coins are hard to make android wallets for, I don't know of anyone who has completed one yet.  For mobile payments and integration with the payment service/Proof-of-Sale system I think we will have to go the online wallet route.  This is something we can leverage the exchange infrastructure, payment site, and PRT .Net code altogether to accelerate building it.  There are a couple of sites out there that provide this service as well that we can look into getting added to.

For the PRTX Qt wallet I have taken Snotty's design from the .Net wallet and tried to implement that look and feel as best as I could.  It will be very nice.

There is something else out of left field I think we should look into - a high end casino for PRTX.  Not a rinky dink script, but a really nice one with international translations.  If anyone knows of any resources for this please pass the info along.

So let me get the pool server sorted out and the payouts out.  Mine as many PRT as you can, you're going to want to be holding onto them to swap out.  And then I will get all of the materials together and published for PRTX.

I am open to any suggestions on the PRTX parameters.  China is our biggest market and userbase, so any feedback on what configuration would be most attractive would be very helpful.

My favorite is the silver coin in #4.  But I also love the first one, it looks really pro.  I'm diggin #10 too.

Anyone want to try mining X11 and let me know if it works?  It looks like somebody briefly connected but theres some invalid shares... do I need to adjust the difficulty for it?  Let me know...

We have added an X11 port to the Particle multipool.  X11 is apparently a little different with difficulty settings, so please try it out and let me know if it needs to be adjusted.  It is on port 5555.

stratum+tcp://particle.shockpools.com:5555

Also all the payouts have been processed and gone out

edit: The SHA payouts are still being processed now and should be out shortly.

Heh, you have no idea :-)  Lately I have been working about 30 hours straight and then catching some sleep, and then 30 hours and then sleep... This IS my job now.

I wanted to ask the community for feedback/input on some of our options.  Proof of Stake has been brought up a few times in the thread.  I've been watching Saturncoin closely as they are doing a migration to a Proof of Stake blockchain.  I am curious to see how it works out in the end with the exchanges etc.  But this is one option we can consider, to create a PoS version of Particle and do a coin swap in the way that they are doing it.  I have shied away from it because it seemed problematic, but if they are able to do it smoothly than maybe this is something we could consider?  What if we created it with a smaller money supply and did something essentially like a reverse stock split, and did the swap out at a 10:1 ratio or something similar?

Thoughts?

One of the things I really like about Particle is that it is a very fast currency, you can move PRT around with great speed which makes it convenient, so I want to do some testing/investigation with Proof of Stake to see if that speed can be maintained.

One of the challenges with the multipool is if people dump their payouts regularly, it somewhat defeats the purpose of the pool and the buy support.  So, I'd like to continue considering all of our other options to keep pushing PRT forward.  The development activity behind the scenes will continue obviously, but some of those developments take time to get to release.  In the meantime maybe there are some other things we can also do.

We are starting to pick up traction on Twitter and social media, so that is a great sign.  One step at a time....

Also note that right now I do all of the payout processing manually, from Excel spreadsheets, and it takes me 1-2 hrs a night to process   It's yet another project for me to code something better to automate as much as possible, it will come.

I am having a lot of problems with long deposit delays with BTER, but they have the liquidity/volume.  I will try moving around to the other exchanges to speed up the process and see how it goes.

All Particle pool payouts have now been processed.  Thanks!

I know there are guys here waiting for payouts from the Particle pool.  I am waiting for BTER to process deposits so I can buy PRT for payouts, but they are taking LONG long time, apologize for the delay but out of my control.  As soon as deposits post I can do the buyup and distribute payouts.  Thank you!

I am going to.  I had a problem with it when I first tried to enable it, but it was unrelated to x11.  Will add it tomorrow.

Just an update.  We'll be doing payouts again in a few hours.  We had a good chat on IRC today with a few folks from the China promotion team.  One thing that we would like to encourage you to do is to hold onto your PRT for awhile after receiving your payouts from the multipool, especially if you are receiving bonuses etc. from community members.

The purpose of the multipool is to help build buy support for PRT.  If you dump your payouts it works against this effect.

There is still a lot of stuff in the pipeline for PRT.  Its been a crazy week in trading and whatnot, but we got the multipool up and established and the hashrate is growing.

I've also noticed we have some fresh blood coming into the community and on Twitter, and this is great.  We need more of this and to grow a diverse community.

I promised a guide/report this week along with the Android wallet, but I've been tied up getting the multipool operational and scripts written to help the administration and payouts.  Right now the payouts take me an hour or two to run each night.  These other items will rollout shortly as well.  You'll also notice we have some more help around here with loq helping out with the multipool and some other things behind the scenes. 

There's a long term plan here that stretches into the summer, we discussed a little bit of it with the China team on IRC but parts are still held close to the vest as I finalize our approach.

PRT is also starting to get wider recognition and is generating some interesting contacts that I hope lead to some great things.

My next biggest priority is to get the Android wallet out the door and a guide about the next big thing coming for PRT.  I'll be putting a lot of work into trying to get this wrapped up this weekend.  One step at a time...

One thing I've noticed that I really appreciate about PRT is the fast transaction times, when moving coins around for payouts...you start to really feel the speed.

I have processed payouts from the multipool...  Hashrate is growing, and the more hashrate the more efficient it is and the more buy pressure we can generate.

If we can get to a couple of GH/s in Scrypt hashpower we could be generating 4-5BTC/day buy pressure which would really help build a floor under PRT's exchange value...

The bump in SAT price helped the multipool profitability today.  I'll be doing payouts again shortly as well as SHA payouts from yesterday.

I'm still working on the Android wallet and will post an update about that soon too.  I put some time into it today.  Need to make some graphics etc.

That looks AWESOME!  Thank you!

Scrypt miners and PRT miners have been paid out.  SHA miners will be paid out shortly - waiting on a coin transfer.  I have a script created now for a semi-automated process but I still process the payments manually.  You know what this is perfect for - an app in the Particle wallet

The Scrypt miners yield was:
Yield:   0.07840582   BTC
   25466   PRT

Considering the low hashrate we've averaged that is pretty good.  The SHA miners faired a little better profitability wise.  I will have my crack team report back with their next suggested coins to add to the mining rotation.

I agree.  The multipool is up, its profitable and its operating... any feature enhancements will get added to the backlog.

After fighting with Redis all day to get a payout reporting script working, I don't want to look at it again for awhile   I'm not a Redis guy, I wound up cheating and just dumping everything to CSV files