But I do think it's fair question to wonder why anyone would spend tens of thousands of their own money, and 12 hour days to support something for free.
I just want to briefly address this comment.
As for money, the data center we are hosted at I've worked with for years. They're very helpful. Most of the hardware we have is donated, however I have been able to score some upgrades and additional items from donations and such and by sweet talking the data center owner. There are actually a few techs there who have their own mining hardware mining on Eligius from inside the same data center. (How's that for low latency?) So, we have a good deal of support from various aspects of the community, and it is much appreciated.
When I contacted the data center this afternoon and was going over the issue they were all for getting it resolved and went to work seeing what they could come up with to help without breaking the bank. Turns out we were able to get a very nice upgrade to the main database server for pennies on the dollar.
I put in my personal time and effort because I believe Eligius is successful, I believe it is the best mining pool, and I believe a legitimate and transparent no-fee pool needs to exist for miners to use to lower their variance without giving up huge amounts of their earnings to do so in pool fees. I personally want such a service to exist, and I use Eligius myself with my own hardware.
Hopefully this helps. Thank you everyone for your support.
-wk
WK, do you normally operate this pool by yourself? If so, kudos to you and the work you're doing. You need to be skilled in a lot of different areas to run an operation like this and I know the pain you're going through.
The only thing I have to say to anyone who wishes to question credibility of the pool, is that I started mining for perhaps 2-3 weeks with Eligius early December and then hopped around to a few different pools to get a comparison. I had withdrawn all my bitcoins at Eligius and had stopped mining for around 2 weeks when I discovered that I curiously had an additional pay out from Eligius, worth about half a day's mining at the time. I don't know why I received this additional pay out, but I had seen the pool experience various issues during the time I mined there, and I knew that some manual reconciliation was occasionally required after these problems occurred. No doubt this additional payout was part of a manual reconciliation.
So even though the problems have not been completely resolved yet, I'm still happy to mine at Eligius because I trust what I have seen with my own eyes.
Thanks for all the good work WK.
Edit:
And the second I post the pool comes back up.
I bet he doesn't even dare to show up anymore
