We are opposed to a scrypt multipool but the OctoCoin devs have reached out to us inquiring about potentially creating a Scrypt-N/X11 pool that would auto-trade what you mined for OctoCoin. The purpose of this would be to make mining with GPUs more efficient again while the scrypt ASICs can continue to mine OctoCoin directly. The primary hurdles are the current lack of OctoCoin sell orders and the possibility that driving the price up by constantly auto-buying OctoCoins on low-volume exchanges would open the door for both direct and indirect manipulation including, but not limited to, the traditional multipools hitting OctoCoin and selling back to us at the (now-inflated) price. If we did this for OctoCoin, we would likely do the same for Murraycoin, Anoncoin, and Megacoin. Based on our latest discussion with the Murraycoin dev, they are apparently planning to implement proof-of-stake in their next release - if they intend to transition to PoS-only (we don't know the final specs) we would definitely create a Murraycoin multipool so people can continue to mine. The Murraycoin dev is an investor in our dedicated cloud mining operation.
Holy jeez, that's kinda close to the same thing I was thinking about doing! With some of the newer stuff out there, it really shouldn't be terribly difficult to get a multipool set up, the web frontend would likely be the hardest part. I've been considering a multipool-type situation for quite a while now, but Scrypt is definitely out the window and I'd really like to use the utmost caution as to not upset any markets/communities/devs, etc. I really haven't even gone as far yet as to work out exactly what coins we'll be dealing with, but the intent is to make it work without "gaming" any payment systems or otherwise exploiting anything, and without being too similar to other such services or sparking rivalry or fierce competition, that's just not how I roll. I have grandiose plans, but I have to always remind myself I'm only one guy, not a company with a board of investors, an awesome staff, and, well, money. I'm not sure where those plans fit into my overall timeline, because as of right now, most of my work has hit a wall, and I still have a casino to properly launch and a few other things I need to be working on first in accordance with being BROKE! Being an army of one isn't very fun sometimes, I'd hire someone but I only trust myself 100%-ish and nobody I know that fits in with the whole trustworthiness thing works for free or for food, so I'll have to stick with the status quo and pray that my luck improves. I swear, since we've moved, I've pretty much made no actually profitable progress in rolling out my plans and ideas. Oh well, if I don't keep trying, I'll surely fail, right? The servers are paid up for the time being but I kinda (temporarily) screwed things up for myself with some faulty math based on incomplete information (read below, I give the whole spiel later)
Anyway, as for my lack of updates lately, it's only because of one disaster after another. The weather has been horrible the last few days, ended up knocking our power out a few times, and once when it came back, my OS HDD was giving the death click and wouldn't boot up. Another instance killed the internet for a few hours. I managed to save everything important off my C: drive, mostly just my bookmarks and a whole crapload of settings and configurations for this and that. When my "Movies" or "Storage" disks decide to go, if I cannot afford a good NAS first, life as I currently know it is over.
Well, maybe some of you have noticed I haven't opened up my casino yet. It's because the 888's I had for my initial investment and testing are gone, so I need to make some back before I can get underway. Everything I had left in my wallet, plus whatever 888 I could buy with all my various change sitting in various sites and wallets I have sent directly back into the pool's wallet. I have also been mining and donating 100% back into the pool to fix the "negative balance" issue I have mentioned before. Well, guess what? I figured out that there is no actual issue here, aside from the "Users" panel in the Admin interface not sorting people's balances properly, when you select a large view like 100, you still have to hit the "Next" button up top, come to find out the default view was NOT enumerating every existing balance greater than 0. So, yeah, I caused the problem when I took out what according to my math was a perfectly acceptable amount, if I'd have known at the time about the problem with the Admin interface, I would not have done it. I went digging through the issues after I discovered the problem and my mistake, but I don't think it's going to be fixed. There is good news, though, after my screwup. It turns out the amount I removed is still actually a bit less than the combined balances of "Stale" users (meaning they haven't logged in for like 60 days), but before I start pruning stale users, first I will replace the amount I screwed up, then start sending notifications to old users, either log in and clear your balances, or your account gets deleted, and they go back to the pool (There's work on an official system to be put in place to do this). I think I will allow for 90 days before I flag any accounts as stale, though. Anyway, that's what's going on, and why I was briefly talking about starting a fresh pool for the hardfork, but the more I thought about it and went back manually verifying thousands of transactions (yeah, it sucked), I knew my system is working right, I'm just being an idiot, again. It'll be back to normal in a few days, and it's not going to affect live payouts at all (unless everyone including all stale users come back and try to withdraw all at once!). Glad I got all that straightened out, I just couldn't get my mind around how there was a 50+ thousand descrepency in my database and have spoken at length with some of the MPOS guys (yet nobody suggested the simple solution, just told me either "you're doing it wrong", "missing payouts", or "your system is misconfigured"(no way)). It's may get on some nerves but I'm re-raising it as an issue, I'm not the only pool owner getting trolled by my own Admin panel. I'll also add that even though I made a mistake (one that's kinda equally my own fault and MPOS's) in removing more than I should have from the server's wallet, this in NO WAY had any effect on any user's actual system-accounted balances, and as always, everyone gets paid regardless, even the stale accounts still have their balances reflected, so after I top up the wallet properly I'll make sure the stale users get ample time and notifications to clean out their accounts! I hope nobody takes issue with anything I've said, it has never been my intention to do anything underhanded to intentionally or even unintentionally screw anyone out of any coins, and I stand by that. I think you guys know me well enough by now to know. Anyway, I'll be as transparent as possible with the process of fixing my screw up, if you have any questions, just ask! It's the kind of mistake I'll only make once, now that I know what to look for. Definitely will be pushing to have the Users reporting issue dealt with, because I'm not the only pool admin that's woefully miscalculated. In our case, though, I was pretty cautious when I moved the coins out, making sure it didn't cause any type of payout errors or anything nasty before I used the coins to pay server bills, and like I said, dug through thousands of TXID's of payouts, manually verified TONS of payments, generated my own figures on fees/txfees/donations minus bonuses and giveaways, and eventually dumped a copy of the DB and it finally dawned on me that every balance greater than 0 was not being reported properly in my admin page (example: filter users accountname by '%' wildcard, select the box to view 100 instead of 10 users, double click balance to sort user balances in descending order, they all descend, maybe starting at a user with 2000 coins, then hit the Next-> button up top (the 1,2,3.. buttons do nothing), sort balances in descending order again, oh wow, there's more users here, with way bigger balances than the first page!) Weird huh?. It only hit me after it was too late, but no worries, Edric's got this!
Meanwhile, the new wallet runs so nicely. No screwy transaction or payout problems or crons shutting down. I have seen a intermittent but non-fatal error with the findblock cron, something I've been meaning to bring up next time I get on IRC. Anyway that's about it for the updates, dealing with everything breaking down, bad weather, and being sick (and flat broke, thanks to my screw up!). Octo-Chance is coming very soon, kinda got put on hold because the coins I was hanging onto for testing went back to the pool, then PC broke down, etc. I'm taking zero chances with this one, so I still have some testing to do, then (since I don't have coins) gather up some investors to make the game functional (doesn't function without actual investments into the system, you can track investments/profits/losses on an individual user basis as well as system wide, all it needs to be officially "finished" is an actual admin interface, for if someone locks themselves out of their account I don't have to "hack" them back in, hehe). There's some extra security measures that will be going up with the official launch as well, which will affect other things on the same system, security's going to be tighter than all my previous services, one by one other services that may be lacking will be brought up to the "new standard" (which I'm working on a list of things that need to be done better/safer, enhanced ddos/hacking protection, the whole package). Current security measures are adequate enough and the sun would run out of gas before anyone could bruteforce anything usable to compromise any of my servers, but seeing as how my future plans call for "more servers" and "more pools and services", the words "adequate security" don't help me sleep any better, so existing services will get the bulletproofing treatment, then I'll work out my "template" for future projects. That reminds me, too, that I have a pretty much turn-key poolserver "template" on DigitalOcean, and they now allow for people to transfer them to each other, if anyone is interested. It saves tons of time when you can just deploy a system image with everything you need, minus fetching new MPOS commits and apt-get updates and your wallet. Just need to sanitize some stuff on my existing template and get it updated.
Ok, nap time. Been feeling like crap, the awful weather has only made me more sore and stiff, and the kids wake up promptly at dawn to begin their EXTREMELY LOUD rampages through our nicely wooden-floored house, stomping and kicking, yelling and beating on every door. You tell them to stop, maybe threaten one or two of them with some kind of imaginative torture or painful death, and it just gets worse when you leave the room. The bad thing is, they listen to me more than they do my sister (their mom), and summer is coming up, this will be an every day thing. Help me.
Oh, quick side note, I saw Octo mention OSX builds, I've nearly got my VM stuff setup where I can finally build OSX wallets.. Don't know why I'm mentioning that, because you'll be getting an official OSX wallet, I'm just excited :b OSX is a huge PITA running in VM's on AMD hardware. I just couldn't justify the cost of a real Mac, though, unless I got a good deal. Ran across an MBP at the pawn shop a while back for 200, was gone quick.
