Status as of Friday, January 16

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Fri Jan 16, 2015 9:32 am

Here's the status of things as of today.

We did some calculations into the bitcoin price and profitability and decided that it makes sense to get the pool to a proof of concept sooner rather than later. Therefore, we decided to postpone the multiple algorithm switching client, as well as other algorithm support. In general, businesses that branch out before mastering their core business fail. Our core business is scrypt mining, and after we release the latest new features, we expect to be the clear leader in profitability.

With bitcoin prices falling, we need to get to a state where we can market the pool heavily to prove whether it will be successful in the long term or not. If the marketing is successful, then we will devote effort to implementing other algorithms. However, if, after we get scrypt coins as profitable as they can possibly be, we can't make enough to support the business, then there is no reason to continue. The most likely case is that we will prove that the pool has the highest profitability, but that bitcoin prices are too low to be profitable now. If that is so, then we don't have any problem with operating until the next bubble happens. The goal in the immediate future is to prove that scrypt mining can be highly profitable.

Here is the current plan:

[*] By January 18, release multiple exchange trading with Poloniex. Possibly, implement another exchange after that if we can find an exchange that supports additional scrypt coins. This feature is in final testing now.
[*] By February 1, release a new algorithm to mine a lot of coins at the same time without increasing the networks' difficulty. This algorithm will allow us to mine coins like Junkcoins, which had a difficulty around 0.5, but as soon as we start mining them, the difficulty jumps to 5 and they are no longer profitable anymore. The purpose of this algorithm is to make sure that coins nobody is mining don't get more miners assigned to them than necessary. This feature is in final testing as well.

After these two features are released, then we will provide a two-week window where we don't advertise to fix bugs that might arise from the releases. Beginning the weekend of February 21, we'll start with Google AdWords, forum advertisement, direct E-Mail marketing, and cold calls.

We will be announcing some downtime over the next weekend at some time soon to release the multiple exchange trading.