Call to action on Gamecredits to prevent coin split

[Steve Sokolowski]

This post is a call to action about impending significant negative effects on the Gamecredits network.

There have been times where Prohashing has been responsible for mining up to 25% of Gamecredits blocks. Until now, we had a lot of faith in Gamecredits as one of the most stable, useful, and reliable scrypt coins. We withdrew all hashrate and stopped allowing customers to earn Gamecredits yesterday and do not plan to re-enable them until this situation is resolved, if it ever is. Since other pools have or are likely to withdraw hashrate from Gamecredits as well, the network is at risk for what happened to Yocoin and Bitconnectcoin, where blocks started getting reversed from huge surges of hashrate and those networks became unusable. The Gamecredits project is in jeopardy of imminent attack and few people seem to recognize this fact.

But even if the network is not attacked, we lost $50,000 in this debacle already, and there are tens of support tickets coming in every day from customers demanding their money. The tickets range from "why has the money not shown up in my exchange" (usually it's because the wallet is "locked") to "my online wallet service doesn't show the balance you paid me" to "I changed my payout address and the coins don't show up in this new wallet." Within the next few days, we are going to have to answer to these customers.

Given that no blocks have occurred since 1:40am (https://prohashing.com/explorer/GameCredit/), it appears to me that this fork has failed, and that is not acceptable to us. The developers submitted a support ticket to us and asked us to upgrade, and we did so upon their advice, expecting them to support this new fork. In my opinion, given how long it has been since the last block, the developers have not done enough work to keep this promise.

Should the developers allow any exchanges to select the old fork, our solution will have to be to provide payouts in both Gamecredits and in "Gamecredits Improved," to pay exchanges to get the new fork listed in addition to the old fork, and to mine both. If Gamecredits Improved can achieve 20% of Gamecredits' value, then we can at least recover $10000 of our own revenue and much more of customers' revenue. In my opinion, this is not a desirable outcome to this situation, but we don't have a choice because we owe customers money on the new blockchain.

I implore the Gamecredits developers to take strong action to get this fork resolved immediately. You started this process and need to follow through to finish it. Work with wallet providers to determine the chain you want them to use. Get exchanges to unlock their wallets. Start an advertising campaign notifying people to download the right client. Take action right now, as a coin split is not in the best interest of anyone.

[gcdev]

What I see is PH forked off at 1,984,934
Block 1,984,933
Block hash dc66a33a3d756a6d2407c5d5b039635654a8700c19db06cbd2042bf9953fb3e7

Correct one (matches): https://blockexplorer.gamecredits.com/b ... f9953fb3e7

Block 1,984,934
Block hash f8643a0fac7290f233818a432c52b9d7dcc7206123cf7feb0afc0374c4d4bd95

Correct one (does NOT match PH) https://blockexplorer.gamecredits.com/b ... 723d3be3eb

I am interested in understanding what occurred at block 1984934 on the PH network to get you guys to fork off. Was there a burst of hash power? Was there a network latency that did not communicate it to the correct nodes? Did you guys add all the nodes listed on https://github.com/gamecredits-project/ ... /readme.md ?

For reference, these are the nodes I talk about:
addnode=18.196.233.17:40002
addnode=18.197.49.217:40002
addnode=18.197.63.122:40002
addnode=13.81.80.199:40002
addnode=13.81.97.125:40002
addnode=13.81.99.236:40002

You and I both are aware that the GameCredits network is weak right now. The nodes above are seed nodes and we request everyone to add them. The next update of the client (0.15.1) will have these nodes hardcoded in. As long as these nodes are in your peers, you should remain on the right chain.

Additionally, I think it is not a very efficient process to use the support portal to get this resolved. Could you please send us an email or join our Discord?

Email addresses can be found in support ticket UST-3597

[Steve Sokolowski]

What I see is PH forked off at 1,984,934
Block 1,984,933
Block hash dc66a33a3d756a6d2407c5d5b039635654a8700c19db06cbd2042bf9953fb3e7

Correct one (matches): https://blockexplorer.gamecredits.com/b ... f9953fb3e7

Block 1,984,934
Block hash f8643a0fac7290f233818a432c52b9d7dcc7206123cf7feb0afc0374c4d4bd95

Correct one (does NOT match PH) https://blockexplorer.gamecredits.com/b ... 723d3be3eb

I am interested in understanding what occurred at block 1984934 on the PH network to get you guys to fork off. Was there a burst of hash power? Was there a network latency that did not communicate it to the correct nodes? Did you guys add all the nodes listed on https://github.com/gamecredits-project/ ... /readme.md ?

For reference, these are the nodes I talk about:
addnode=18.196.233.17:40002
addnode=18.197.49.217:40002
addnode=18.197.63.122:40002
addnode=13.81.80.199:40002
addnode=13.81.97.125:40002
addnode=13.81.99.236:40002

You and I both are aware that the GameCredits network is weak right now. The nodes above are seed nodes and we request everyone to add them. The next update of the client (0.15.1) will have these nodes hardcoded in. As long as these nodes are in your peers, you should remain on the right chain.

Additionally, I think it is not a very efficient process to use the support portal to get this resolved. Could you please send us an email or join our Discord?

Email addresses can be found in support ticket UST-3597

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to us! I was worried that we would never be able to contact anyone from Gamecredits.

Thanks for pointing out this fork. I'll ask Chris to repair it by deleting the blockchain. That will solve the immediate issue with this node, but the larger issue is with the exchanges and their locked wallets.

I think that the entire issue can be resolved if you can get just one exchange to unlock its wallet on the new blockchain. That will allow us to dramatically increase the hashrate on the network, to pay our customers, and it will set an example to the other exchanges to unlock their wallets too! Plus, it will stop the continuing price decline of Gamecredits caused by this issue.

Unfortunately, I don't have any information as to what could have caused the fork at 1:40am. We weren't mining Gamecredits at the time, so it had to have been an issue with network connectivity. This seems to happen occasionally to many coins, and Chris often has to delete the blockchain of coins and restart them, so Gamecredits may simply have inherited this error from an upstream coin.

Thanks,

-Steve

[gcdev]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to us! I was worried that we would never be able to contact anyone from Gamecredits.

Thanks for pointing out this fork. I'll ask Chris to repair it by deleting the blockchain. That will solve the immediate issue with this node, but the larger issue is with the exchanges and their locked wallets.

I think that the entire issue can be resolved if you can get just one exchange to unlock its wallet on the new blockchain. That will allow us to dramatically increase the hashrate on the network, to pay our customers, and it will set an example to the other exchanges to unlock their wallets too! Plus, it will stop the continuing price decline of Gamecredits caused by this issue.

Thanks,

-Steve

Steve - no problem. We are actively engaging exchanges and asking them to update - some are more responsive than others. Bittrex I think will be the next one to come active, they are working closely with us to resolve issues relating to their wallet. Poloniex unfortunately I don't have an update for, but I suspect they will work by themselves and bring it online at some point (don't worry... we will keep bugging them )

I agree 100% that the exchanges are currently the issue and please be assured we are doing everything we can to get them on the correct chain and start accepting deposit/withdrawal requests again. As a former miner and current holder of GameCredits, I totally understand the effect that shutting down exchange wallets has on the economy and it is our #1 priority to get that up and running again.

Please keep an eye out on the official GameCredits twitter account @GameCredits, we will inform the greater community as each exchange comes back online.

Steve - if there's an email or another contact method that we can reach you or Chris at for future network updates to be better coordinated, please do let us know. If it's only the support portal, we understand.

Thanks,
gcdev

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to us! I was worried that we would never be able to contact anyone from Gamecredits.

Thanks for pointing out this fork. I'll ask Chris to repair it by deleting the blockchain. That will solve the immediate issue with this node, but the larger issue is with the exchanges and their locked wallets.

I think that the entire issue can be resolved if you can get just one exchange to unlock its wallet on the new blockchain. That will allow us to dramatically increase the hashrate on the network, to pay our customers, and it will set an example to the other exchanges to unlock their wallets too! Plus, it will stop the continuing price decline of Gamecredits caused by this issue.

Thanks,

-Steve

Steve - no problem. We are actively engaging exchanges and asking them to update - some are more responsive than others. Bittrex I think will be the next one to come active, they are working closely with us to resolve issues relating to their wallet. Poloniex unfortunately I don't have an update for, but I suspect they will work by themselves and bring it online at some point (don't worry... we will keep bugging them )

I agree 100% that the exchanges are currently the issue and please be assured we are doing everything we can to get them on the correct chain and start accepting deposit/withdrawal requests again. As a former miner and current holder of GameCredits, I totally understand the effect that shutting down exchange wallets has on the economy and it is our #1 priority to get that up and running again.

Please keep an eye out on the official GameCredits twitter account @GameCredits, we will inform the greater community as each exchange comes back online.

Steve - if there's an email or another contact method that we can reach you or Chris at for future network updates to be better coordinated, please do let us know. If it's only the support portal, we understand.

Thanks,
gcdev

Hi,

I think that the support portal is the best place to reach us. The traditional stereotype of support portals is that nobody reads them, which is true for Coinbase and most of the exchanges. But we paid a lot of money for JIRA because it allows everyone who is interested in a ticket to track it and be notified of replies, and because new issues can reference previous issues. Anyone who works for us can be assigned on the ticket when necessary. E-Mails can easily get lost, sent to junk, sent to the person who isn't best equipped to resolve the situation, or someone could forget to click "reply to all."

Thanks,

-Steve

[gcdev]

Hi,

I think that the support portal is the best place to reach us. The traditional stereotype of support portals is that nobody reads them, which is true for Coinbase and most of the exchanges. But we paid a lot of money for JIRA because it allows everyone who is interested in a ticket to track it and be notified of replies, and because new issues can reference previous issues. Anyone who works for us can be assigned on the ticket when necessary. E-Mails can easily get lost, sent to junk, sent to the person who isn't best equipped to resolve the situation, or someone could forget to click "reply to all."

Thanks,

-Steve

That's fair - we will make a note to reach out to you via the support portal any time communication towards mining pools is required. Thanks for the reply!

[gcdev]

Steve,
Just wanted to let you know that Bittrex and Livecoin are live on the correct chain Happy Hashing!

Regards,
gcdev