The HowlCoin miner has been upgraded to become further in line with the goal of Howlcoin and to prevent fraudulent attempts at mining more coins than is possible.
The goal of HowlCoin is for the mining to be evenly accessible to everyone- that having the money to buy processors would not give you an advantage of someone who couldn't.
The idea behind "Proof of time" is simply that both a millionaire and a broke person have the same amount of time. So if time is what you trade for the coin instead of processing power, all users are on a level playing field.
The miner originally ran on the website and you could leave it running in the background. Unfortunately the system would get flagged with users trying to run the miner on many tabs at the same time and using other automated methods to try to multiply their coins.
Mining now works in a different way.
At the top of every hour, a button appears on the miner. If you click the button, you earn 1.25 HWL.
The button only appears for 10 seconds, at the top of every hour (So at Midday exactly, at 1pm, at 2pm etc). Those are your 10 second windows to collect HowlCoins. This means you no longer need to leave the miner running on your PC. All you have to do is offer your 'time' by being there at the top of the hour to collect your coin. This means a millionaire and a broke person have no advantage over each other- if they are there running the miner at the top of the hour they will get their coin when the button appears and they click it.
This is also a much more secure way to distribute coins. Depending on what happens, we may eventually introduce a Captcha style puzzle to solve instead of it just being a button.
There have been a lot of complaints about mining withdrawal times. While there were many factors contributing to this, one was low gas fees. We use a low gas fee for transactions, however recently these transactions have not been totally reliable and take a long time go through. To make this better, we have made it so that the miner will remember how many coins you have earned, and once you have earned 20 HWL, you can withdraw. This means many users will use the app to hold the HWL temporarily and the withdrawal requests will be less, which means they will go through more efficiently.
If anyone is using the old miner, they should hit "Withdraw" and if you do so soon, that withdrawal will be processed soon. But over the next day the old miner will be disconnected and withdrawal requests will no longer be processed.
Other questions:
Airdrops
They have been going out slowly and will continue to do so. Before Jan 1 all legitimate airdrops will have been processed.
Other features
We have a working app, windows and mac version of the miner, but we have been holding back until the miner is refined (So we don't have to update all of them each time). Depending on how the new miner goes, the others will be released shortly.
Video
I will create a walkthrough video for the new miner, showing it in action and posting that here in the thread soon.
PM me if you have any questions! Keep an eye on the blockchain if you are missing mining coins from recently- they have slowed down as the blockchain got mega congested this weekend, worst it has been in months.