Site is going down for maintenance soon. I will look into the mining issue.
Regarding the new captcha. As maxpaynezzz put it - it was necessary to keep up with the cost of servers and withdrawals once high level players appear. At the moment, the site is pouring out money and I maintain it with my empty wallets. No other faucet out there has such a high guaranteed amount of payouts (you get 50-10,000 satoshi from each drip, whereas this game, at the moment, guarantees 1,800 satoshis / hour).
I did consider using SolveMedia captchas but turned it down for mainly 2 reasons. 1 - botters already know how to bypass their security and create bots for sites using this captcha. 2 - financial reasons: You need to sign a WD-8 in my country in order to get paid, and they pay you out in American Dollars. I would like to keep the profits from the site purely in Bitcoins (you might have noticed no Google Adsense on my site and limited advertisement.)
I understand that it is a difficult transition from the old captcha, and I probably never should have introduced the old one in the first place. However, this is the path we are currently treading. The site is still in beta and I am testing out things to see if they work well. It is all balancing difficult subjects. Like this new captcha - hard for users, good for keeping the site online.
At the moment, the captcha will stay in place. I will consider running a vote for users to decide the next step though. Bear in mind that the alternative is plastering the site with advertisement. Check out
http://ore-mine.com/ as an example of this.
This captcha was meant as the first step of a collaboration with
http://bottingcenter.com which would lead to automatic withdrawals instead of the current manual ones. As well as a couple of other things I have planned - things I named "time wasters".
Regarding increasing payouts. Payouts will obviously be increased depending on how the site performs. Right now though, it is a big black hole and not affordable at all to increase payouts.
Thank you for your understanding. I will put the site in maintenance within the hour.
EDIT: I fixed the gold mining issue. Will still put site in maintenance soon.
Update: The mining should be working properly now. Autominer has been disabled for the duration of this referral contest. So that users does not buy autominers for their referrals in order to generate points.
The avg. time of captcha will be reduced to 15 seconds very soon. I have been in contact with the staff @ BottingCenter, and they have explained that this timer will be reduced within the next couple of hours.
