One of the next major features I'd like to work on (although it is a very large codebase change) is optional payouts in the coins that we mine. Essentially you'd be able to "register" (sign a message from your btc account) an altcoin address, and those addresses would get paid mined coins (before exchange), and any leftover balance would be exchanged. So essentially, depending on the coins we've mined, you might get back 50% in that coin, and 50% in btc, and the next day a different amount (depending on how much was mined).
It has a bunch of benefits for everyone, we can avoid the exchange (fees), can avoid pushing down the market a bit (not selling those coins), and people get to hold coins they want to hold (optional). Its a win-win, its just a lot of code
PW, you should elaborate this 'other coins' feature more:
- would it be possible to be paid in LTC instead of BTC - I mean some cryptos are traded for LTC also (Cryptsy)?
- payout could be in mined coins - BUT you should indicate at what price level should these cryptos be sold off - in order to maintain profitability
I mean - the point is not that I hold coins - as I have to pay some expenses. The point is - that if you pay me in native coins - then I have more chance to sell off coins in a week or so.
Also, coins must be paid out ASAP they are mature.
None of what I'm about to say is fully fleshed out yet, its just my first stab at how it would be handled (what makes sense as fitting into the existing payout/balances system). It is very likely to change.
Payouts would still be done at the normal timings (2x daily). We wouldn't be offering to exchange coins into anything other than BTC, just offering to send out coins we had mined (and possibly only a subset of the actively mining coins) instead of exchanging them to BTC first. For this example, lets say we added payouts in LTC. When we did the normal process of exchanging coins to BTC, we would look at how many people wanted payouts in LTC, what their balances were, and keep that amount of LTC off to the side (instead of exchanging), the rest would be sent to the exchange as usual. When were to run payouts later, we would have some users who requested LTC. These users would be paid from the LTC that was held aside from exchanging, and any other balance in BTC. For example, if we didn't mine any LTC that day and didn't have any LTC, you may have requested LTC as a payout option, but would be getting payouts that day in BTC (no LTC held aside, no earnings in LTC for the day). Other days, if we mined 50% LTC, 50% others, you would get 50% of your payout in LTC, 50% in BTC.
Essentially everything would stay the same in terms of exchanging. Coins would always go XX -> BTC, just some coins could bypass our exchange process, and be held for payouts.
The issue of what price they're "sold" at I hadn't thought much about yet. I imagine we'd have two valid options there, neither is quite right, but both seem close-enough to be acceptable. One option is to use the last-trade price (or highest bid), since these aren't actually being sold immediately, they don't affect depth/etc. So if we sent you 1 LTC, we would count that as exchanged to BTC (for profitability calculations) at the current price. The other alternative would be to use our existing pricing system, which accounts for depth/markets. The first option would be high (not everyone can sell at the highest bid), the 2nd option would be low (we estimate prices
extremely cautiously). Maybe we average them?
Most likely (at least to start), we'll only be adding a few of our larger coins that we mine on a daily basis (and mine in enough quantity to justify payouts). The ones that come to mind immediately are LTC/DOGE. Adding more wouldn't be difficult, but those two are a good starting point I think
An extension to this (and a decently sized extension it is), would be to allow for some of your BTC balance to be "exchanged" to LTC locally. For example, if you wanted LTC payouts, and we had another user who didn't want LTC payouts, we could theoretically "exchange" some of your already converted BTC earnings (non LTC earnings) for his not-yet-converted LTC earnings (exchange price makes more of a difference here). This is just something we could theoretically do, it wouldn't be planned for the initial implementation (way more things could go wrong here comparatively).
