Hi everyone, a long overdue reply here from the dev. I have been busy fixing things, maybe breaking things
, recompiling and handling support in Slack. Thanks very much to the community members that have been echoing messages from Slack to here.
First, I'm not sure if it was already clearly stated that the pool payments from the original chain were recovered and all payments will be reimbursed. Every single one. Nobody will lose any of the coins they already mined when it's all said and done. As long as you possess your original wallet address - just the address, doesn't matter if you still have the wallet file. If you don't have it anymore, we'll still figure something out to make things right.
There has been a lot of criticism, and rightly so. Unfortunately, this is technology we are dealing with, and while it is not perfect, the humans behind it (me and alexius) are even less perfect. Mistakes were made and lessons were learned. This is my first cryptocoin launch, and many of the mistakes trace back to sheer inexperience.
You all deserve answers and I'll try to walk you through the series of events and my perspective.
I want to address concerns about lost revenue from mining. I would like to point out that when the decision to reset the blockchain occurred, the pool was - once again - stalled. From the pool's inception this morning when we launched, we experienced difficulties with the pool. It is based on an open source codebase for many cryptonote pools but it required tweaking to work properly with INT. These bugs were not visible in small-scale testing with only one miner, and without kilohashes of mining power. In any case, poor code in the payment processing lead to many pool server restarts, which somehow created some bad and corrupt payment transactions. This required manual intervention and resulted in 30+ min of non-accepted blocks on a couple different occasions. There were some forks occurring while the pool was stalled. In any case, the blockchain would have required manual manipulation in one form or another. If it's any consolation, it appeared most pool mining clients did restart as soon as the pool went up again on the new chain. From the moment the pool on the new chain went live, we jumped from 85 blocks to 135 blocks in only several minutes time. So if you were paying for mining services or running your own rigs, hopefully you only missed the time that the pool was down while I was recompiling the code for a new block, and of course the time that the pool was stalled.
We also are offering the pool with 0 fee as a courtesy and to engage the community. No profits are made from this pool or any of the hours of troubleshooting that went into it. However we would strongly encourage someone to setup another pool, and in fact we would prefer that so the entire blockchain isn't controlled by one pool!
What a surprise, no one has answered what would have been so hard about announcing a coin re-launch to occur 12 hours from when the problems started?
Probably the answer is "devs already had their miners set up, and didn't want to wait to let others reset their miners to new chain".
I'm not an unfair FUDer. In fact, you will see me defending the early launch problems, earlier in this thread. But the way this re-launch was handled is silly.
I hope that, to the extent devs are compensating people by providing them replacement coins, that:
1) You will provide both the confirmed and unconfirmed balance in any .wallet files from the old chain
2) You will provide any coins "burned" by mining to that old address on the new chain, before the miners could be re-started with a new chain address
3) You will take the coins out of your own developer reward. This is key - you made a mistake, the only way to show ownership of your mistake is to pay out of your own pockets. If you just increase the supply artificially or provide us with coins that were earmarked for bounties, you are just diluting the value of the brand without taking any responsibility.
This is a list that would start to address some of the concerns about your impulsive and reckless decision to not do a fair re-launch.
Sure, let's talk about the decision to restart the chain immediately as opposed to waiting. I felt it was necessary to restart the chain as soon as absolutely possible rather than delaying it, as any time spent on the old chain would be more time people wasted mining senselessly - on a chain that would be abandoned. I was under the impression, based on heavy engagement in the Slack community, that nearly everyone was using the pool to mine. Many people were mentioning how solo mining was not practical due to the high difficulty and the fact that the pool was so rapidly pumping blocks out. I could also see the astronomical 600+ kH/sec hash rate on our pool. I knew people were spending good money to mine our coin. I wanted them up and running again as soon as possible. And I knew that the pool would continue to mine as it was after I restarted the chain. I am a people-pleaser, and I like to deliver things as soon as possible. It just made sense to me to get it going again
now rather than later, especially as it seemed most interested parties would not be affected (since pool mining would auto restart on the new chain).
Was it the right decision? Perhaps not! Alexius89-2 is in a 12 hour different timezone than me and I had to make a decision. So I did. In retrospect, it could have been different, and I'm sorry it wasn't. We're doing everything we can to make things right for everyone involved.
And since you mentioned "devs already had their miners set up" - sure, I had a miner going, at 5 kH/sec. That's less than 1% of our pool hashing power. It's negligible. I wish I could say I had more than that in the pool, but I just don't have those kind of resources. My goal in getting things immediately up and running again was to address the interests of everyone, not just "the devs".
1. We will definitely reimburse all payments as they were made from the pool. I am not certain yet if we can see all unconfirmed (pending) balances -- more time will be needed to analyze the database.
2. Sure, although as long as people didn't delete their wallet files, the 'old' addresses from previous chain still work just fine on the new chain. Sorry if there was some confusion about this. I'm still using my old address from the original chain.
3. We are doing the best we can to own this, and I think your point is very reasonable. We have no problem paying all restitutions from our pocket.
Much was learned today - about community engagement, problem resolution, and communication. I can confidently say I did my best, and I gave it my all... and I'll continue to do that while I'm privileged to be a developer on this project.
We are very excited for the future of Intense, especially due to how much community interest there is. This is a project we are immensely passionate about, and we couldn't have anticipated so much support from the community.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) interacting with the blockchain, in the manner we proposed, is almost unheard of. Let's forge into unknown territory together... it probably won't be painless, but it will be better than day 1 was.
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I've said some very critical things today, but I want to try to be fair. So I will preface the following by saying there is some good, but still some bad, so don't just ignore it as FUD:
Your general points"These bugs were not visible in small-scale testing with only one miner, and without kilohashes of mining power." - This seems kind of shortsighted from a
tech development team. You've never had to load test something before?? To the extent you're learning things from this experience, I hope it includes testing your VPN solution on more than one machine.
"We also are offering the pool with 0 fee as a courtesy and to engage the community." I will note this is something you did right from the start, and one of the reasons why I initially defended your launch. Your own success is rooted in people adopting your coin. Offering a fair launch (with a countdown) and a pool at the very start is how you ensure the community feels involved from the outset. This is why your decision to re-launch without giving advanced notice was damaging (that is just my opinion of course).
"I felt it was necessary to restart the chain as soon as absolutely possible rather than delaying it, as any time spent on the old chain would be more time people wasted mining senselessly - on a chain that would be abandoned." -
This is a good argument IF you can explain to me how people mining to their
old address will be able to recover their coins on the
new chain. You mention later in your post that you are still using your old address. How? Is my wallet file from the old chain somehow compatible with the new chain? And if I load it on the new chain, I'll get all the coins I was automatically mining after the re-launch? I've been afraid to try this, but I think one or two people have said they can't open their old wallet file on the new chain? So how do I get those coins?
IF in fact that mining power has not been lost, then I actually think you made a reasonable decision in a situation without a clear right answer (but nevertheless the wrong decision with how you communicated it).
EDIT: I TRIED IT, AND SEE NOW THAT MINING TO THE OLD ADDRESS ON THE NEW CHAIN WAS NOT LOST - I WAS ABLE TO OPEN MY OLD .WALLET FILE ON THE NEW CHAIN. I am now reversing my position: devs made the right call by not delaying re-launching, because that would have been a waste of any set-and-forget hash power that was already in use. It remains to be seen whether they will fully reimburse us the coins on the old chain, and do so out of their own dev reward.Your responses to my three points1. "We will definitely reimburse all payments as they were made from the pool. I am not certain yet if we can see all unconfirmed (pending) balances" - Do you mean you can't see (or are not sure you can see) pending balances on the pool, that were never sent to the miner's own wallet? Or do you mean you can't see unconfirmed transactions that were sent to the miner's wallet but are still waiting for 60 confirms. I think your failure to pay either of those would be bad, but I would be willing to forgive the former. I see no reason why the latter would be true: you should be able to see balances that were actually sent to miners' wallets, and if you can't then you need to set up an explorer for the old chain and manually look at every transaction, because you're going to stiff people on tens of thousands of coins if you don't pay those balances in full.
2. As I already mentioned above, I'm curious to hear how mining to the old address on the new chain can be recovered. Wouldn't I lack the private keys to the old wallet address on the new chain? Again, I haven't tried it because I don't want to corrupt anything. (EDIT: See above).
3. Your willingness to pay this out of the developer reward would be a very mature step in the right direction. Is there a way for community members to verify you did this, instead of reducing the bounty pool?
Overall, I will now be reserving (my own personal) judgment on your re-launch until I know how people can recover the coins they were mining to the old address on the new chain.
