Greetings, Eligius Miners!
So, few things going on recently! First, lots of updates to the stats as many have noticed. (Thank you to those who donated, its appreciated!) Additions to user stats pages, as well as a couple of graphs to help describe the "luck/variance" of the CPPSRB reward system in the form of a hypothetical 1GH miner that was mining for the past 60 days. Notice that as of now, that miner would have been paid close to 100% PPS. It actually was at 100%, but, few recent bad-luck rounds dropped it down a little bit, but, I expect it will rebound soon!
Some additions and fixes to the pool software have been applied. Nothing too major.
Vardiff has been decently tested and has been in full effect. (Bring on the the ASICs!)
Most notably, however, is a brief announcement regarding namecoin merged mining. It seems now that the namecoin project is essentially dead, and more recently the namecoin block chain has become the target of abuse for use as arbitrary data storage, which is unacceptable. I'm going to monitor this closely. However, since the namecoin block chain is likely to only be more and more abused (and, as far as I can tell, is not used anywhere for it's intended purpose anymore), Eligius will no longer be offering namecoin merged mining.
So the official announcement at this time is,
in 30 days, on Saturday, March 23, 2013, Eligius will cease merged mining of the namecoin block chain. All unpaid
NMC balances will be paid at or around this time. Edit: Note that if the namecoin block chain is overly abused in this time, the pool will drop namecoin support sooner.
If by some chance the general fate of namecoin changes for the better at anytime, this decision can be revisited, of course.
Happy mining!
-wk
