Both moneropool.org and extremepool.org worked for me (payouts received).

Sorry to hear that, sounds awful.

Getting similar error messages here

I have been experimenting with pools. So far I have tried moneropool.org and extremepool.org, with equal hashpower pointed at both. Both have paid out although I have thus far received a larger payout from moneropool over the same time period (24 hours) than extremepool. Based on what is being said upthread this sounds like it may be an issue with somebody breaking payment processing at extremepool by using an invalid payment address, which they are working on fixing. I'll post an update if things change.

Ultimately people who blatantly distort the market through greed will be hurting their own returns as they will scare off the user base that they seek to profit from before it even develops. We'll have to see how it plays out in the end.

Ok cool, thanks for the quick reply.

Just to be clear, resyncing the blockchain now (i.e. after deleting the old one) will be sufficient? Have the fake blocks been removed and the old balances restored?

Is there a reason you're so personally invested in this? Monero is less than a month old and has been maintained by a loosely-affiliated group of developers, not some kind of internet cabal. That's the source of the disorganization that seems to bother you (e.g. the change in name, domain, etc.).

Right now there is obviously either an optimized miner or some kind of botnet on the network. If someone has inspected the Cryptonote source and used their abilities (programming, financial, or otherwise) to gain an advantage it sucks for the rest of us but is not an insta-mine. That's just the way the world works. Someone else is better at something and they get ahead. I think it's pretty naive to think that people won't try to gain an inside advantage if they can. Although it's nice for people to share crypto mining resources (e.g. cgminer, sgminer, guiminer, Noodledoodle's code fork) there is no moral obligation that they do so. Ultimately if something is unfair we're free to choose not to participate. Whoever has dramatically increased the hash runs the risk of alienating their potential future buyers if they shut everyone else out of the game, but we'll have to wait and see if that happens.

Yeah I got only minor gains on Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge cpus in windows. Seems the upgrade most benefits AMD unfortunately 

So are we able to continue mining while a fix is finalized? I'm in no rush to go through the process of updating to a beta wallet if a final one is going to be released soon anyway. I still seem to be synced to the network in the daemon, it's just that obviously the wallet cannot currently receive any new transactions.

Because you are merging Monero, a coin somewhat distinct for a clean launch, with a coin shrouded in mystery with a lot of suspicious manipulation around it (80% mined when released to the public, vague allusions to use in the darknet despite no real evidence as such, an incredibly polished pool miner (Minergate) within days of launch that just happens to charge 10%, team separated from the Cryptonote team for unclear reasons, etc.). That hurts the marketability of Monero. I highly doubt that Bytecoin will ever take off as it will never be able to shake the 80% mined problem. Look at how much trouble Darkcoin has and that was an order of magnitude smaller ninja-mine. 

Monero also doesn't need the Bytecoin network to secure its hash as it is already on track to surpass the Bytecoin net hashrate. It would essentially be linking Monero to a coin that will likely become increasingly smaller relative to Monero for no real advantage.

Yeah my laptop hasn't found anything for a couple of days now. It's starting to get pretty high diff.

For what it's worth I really don't think Monero needs merged mining and strongly discourage others from following through with this. Monero can stand on its own as the first freely-distributed Cryptonote currency and doesn't need to be tied to Bytecoin, which is more than 80% mined already. Why bother affiliating with another coin when Monero has already seen huge increases in hash in only one week of mining? If a botnet hadn't jumped on Bytecoin Monero was already on track to surpass its net hash.

Yeah looking very lopsided towards sells right now...

I think this is the right attitude. Like you I stand to "lose" from this decision in having my early mining halved, but I welcome it. Given how scammy the average coin launch is, I think maximizing fairness for everyone is the right move. Combining a fair distribution with the innovation of Cryptonote tech could be what differentiates Monero from other coins.

So long as the process is fair and transparent it makes no difference what the number is... n or n/2 is the same relative value so long as the /2 is applied to everyone. Correcting this now will avoid people accusing the coin of a favourable premine for people who mined in the first week.

To expand on this, if you read the Cryptonote whitepaper (see https://cryptonote.org/whitepaper.pdf) you'll see that the PoW, even if implemented on a GPU, would be unlikely to give a significant advantage, as it is limited by memory random access speed rather than bandwidth (the traditional strength of GPUs for hashing).

There's an interesting discussion of the merits of CPU mining in the Cryptonote whitepaper. They don't necessarily inherently support CPU only, but essentially wanted to return to the original proposal of Satoshi of one CPU = one vote. Their goal with the PoW was to minimize the relative advantage of any type (CPU, GPU, FPGA, ASIC) of hardware.

I agree with you re: botnets. It seems highly improbable to me that the botnets are sitting here monitoring a bitcoin forum waiting to flood into a week-old currency that currently has no method of exchange. As you've mentioned there are a lot more profitable ways a malevolent user can use a botnet. And if they did want to mine, why wouldn't they target something like DRK that can be profitably CPU mined and has direct exchange for BTC already in place?

What kind of setup are you using? I have a medium spec Sandy Bridge i5 and found two blocks today at current diff, so either you have terrible luck or bad equipment.