Sooo.... There haven't been any SMLY blocks for over 5 hours :-/
Yeah, we've been plagued a bit by a few issues in the past few days/weeks and we're still trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
I *think* the problem is fixed and I *think* the actual source of the problem is at the prohashing mining pool.
This is what
we observed:
- 1 An ever increasing mempool with some very old transactions not getting confirmed
- 2 Prices (at novaexchange) stabilised around 10 Satoshi, from several months at 0.2 and yearly average close to 1
- 3 Difficulty levels much higher than we've ever seen before
c-cex has stated that they have lost a lot of coins and are not happy with this. One possible reason may be a 51% attack back in March or so. They have not answered our requests for what needs to be done for them to reopen for trading.
cryptopia has said that they are investigating a possible fork. They have given no answer to questions on how long this may take or how it is coming along.
Would be good if they kept in touch with their users about this.
Exchanges told us they were seeing apparent transaction reversals for old, confirmed, transactions. If anyone can tell us how that can happen (apart from a 51% attack), then we'd like to know! I've been looking at this for some time now (ever since c-cex froze our wallet) and I see no convincing evidence of a 51% attack since these things only happen while prohashing is the sole mining pool.
The folks at prohashing acknowledge the problem in how they handle allocation of hashpower to small coins and have said that they were implementing mods to their algorith, but so far we have not seen any improvement. The resulting behaviour is not just detrimental to us, but it also results in lower payouts for their own customers, so one would think they had an interest in doing something about it, but...
Here is a bigger problem:
Blocks mined at prohashing commonly do not include available transactions!I don't know why that is or how that can be done. Note that they are a merge mining pool so they do some weird stuff to each block. Whatever the reason is, they have allowed the SMLY mempool to steadily increase by mining without picking up SMLY transactions. Prohashing have the hash power to completely dominate all mining for coins like SMLY.
They have not responded on why they do not include transactions in blocks.
Until recently we also had hashlink as a pool and this problem did not occur with them. But when hashlink died a while ago - no reply from the sysadmin - prohashing became the only pool and with that our problems seemed to escalate.
The folks at Novaexchange have been extremely helpful in diagnosing the problem and finding ways to move on.
We obviously need our own pool - one that we control: one that does not go down at someone else's whim and one that actually puts transactions into blocks. That will be set up during the week and from then on we will be picking up transactions through any mining done with that pool.
The longer-term solution is to include more mining algorithms and that is being worked on, as described earlier on this page. It will take a bit longer but we should get it out this summer.
Now, I don't know how a large mempool can affect the exchanges so that confirmed deposits disappear. If anyone has thoughts on this then I am all ears!
Some of you have coins at c-cex and cryptopia. I do hope they will reopen their markets for SMLY so that you can access your coins.
