Status as of Saturday, November 8

[Steve Sokolowski]

• We're going to release a new feature today: the ability to choose which coins to mine will go live sometime before 3PM EST. After that time, you'll be able to select a single coin to mine by using the "c=" password argument. A new section has been added to the documentation at http://prohashing.com/help.html#settings-passwordargs describing the two currently available arguments (the other is "d=,") which has been available for some time.
• This new argument will allow people who want to support smaller networks and also boost their payouts with merge mining to use this pool as a single-coin pool that eliminates their variance. Because of the availability of merge mining, which sells the dogecoins for the intended coin the miner wants to earn, we can now beat any pool that solely mines a single currency and pays out in that one currency, even if that pool charges no fee.
• This feature is also useful for people with hugely powerful miners that perform poorly with frequent work restarts. I'm interested in someone setting his or her password to "d=65536 c=litecoin" after 3:00 and seeing how that affects the performance of those miners.
• I'm going on an advertising blitz today after this release, to market the pool to people who want to be paid out in other coins than bitcoins. Right now, we have a lot of bitcoin payouts because the majority of users found the site through PoolPicker, a site that lists pool payouts in bitcoins.
• We evaluated the usefulness of mining multiple coins at the same time and decided that, while valuable, we can make more money by advertising, and secondarily, continuing with the multiple exchange testing, so that is what I will do tomorrow.
• Yesterday, we had a period where profitability was over 25 cents, because the coin Bitmark had a difficulty drop of 1/4. We had to stop mining the coin after two hours because the price of Bitmark on Cryptsy is 20% lower than on Poloniex and we will likely be crashing it another 50%. On Poloniex, there is a thriving market in Bitmark, but we don't have multiple exchange support yet. If someone wants to help us out by performing arbitrage between the two exchanges, then we can make a lot of money with Bitmark. I personally don't understand why people would pass up easy 20% gains between the two exchanges. We'll keep looking at Cryptsy's market to see if the prices between the two exchanges normalize due to arbitrage and re-enable Bitmark if they do.