the trades gave middlecoin the edge over the other pools, but it's either too hard to trade to profit now, or the site op has given up. they may have a bunch of manual trades to input, but who cares? it's been like this for a couple of days now, so site ops don't care.
middlecoin did do extremely well with dogecoin, and i think we started mining it a few days before everyone else caught on. middlecoin was likely selectively mining low-difficulty doge blocks too, which helped us through dec-jan.
i assume middlecoin is under new management and the people that made it work well are gone now, or they're content to just let it run into the ground.
Don't know where he was, but he was on the boards.