Status as of Tuesday, October 14

Here's a short update as of this morning:

• The rising bitcoin price is killing us. Because we are mining difficult coins some of the time, we need to hold a reserve, but previously our reserve is in dollars. We realized last night that if we didn't buy several bitcoins as a reserve, then we might end up with a huge debt should the next bubble begin soon. I told Chris to buy two, since a litecoin block is worth 0.6 bitcoins and that will cover us except unless we are 1 in 1000 unlucky.
• I successfully implemented static difficulties. In the next release, you'll be able to enter a password of d=X, where 512 <= X <= 65536. If you don't enter a password, then the current algorithm that optimizes difficulty will be used, with a small change: the maximum difficulty will be changed to 16384 to reduce bandwidth usage. Some ASICs don't like a difficulty that high, but people who have a problem can manually configure difficulty. This difficulty will be available on a per-unit basis, so you can configure a huge block of units all with different difficulties.
• We will freeze the code tomorrow or Wednesday in preparation for Saturday's release.

If you would like to prepare for Saturday's update, you can can set your password field to your desired share difficulty right now. The setting will not affect anything in the current version, but when your miner reconnects after the server comes back online Saturday your miner will then choose the correct difficulty.