Hi Tommy,

One of the issues facing PascalCoin is mining centralisation.  Nanopool is currently mining over 99% of the blocks and this is a big impediment for exchange listings and wider adoption. This is the real reason our price/cap is so strangely low, as you rightly point out in your great video. If this issue is resolved, many exchange listings will follow, our volume will increase by order of magnitude, and so will price. From a cost-benefit-analysis perspective, every dollar spent resolving this issue will yield far greater ROI than a dollar spent on marketing.

Before Nanopool took-over,  we had several pools who were actively participating and contributing to PascalCoin. Our BTC price was far higher too. As Nanopool began rising in block dominace, the miners became increasingly frustrated culminating in a very public FUD campaign (Slack/BCT) accusing us of having exploits. Even I bought into this FUD and believed for a long-time Nano was doing a selfish-mining attack. Albert and I spent a great deal of time investigating this issue and found nothing. I even had two well-known Cornell researchers review the situation and they also concluded there was no exploit, Nano was not cheating and they even congratulated us on the great difficulty adjustment algorithm we used (similar to recent BCH DAA). However, after the FUD campaign and Nano's continuing 99% dominance, our price has not recovered properly. However, this can be changed so since we now understand why and how Nanopool took over.

It’s an economics issue, not a technical issue. Since we are GPU-friendly PoW coin, it has made us a prime candidate for dual-mining by the Ethereum-centric Nanopool. Since ETH is a memory-hard PoW coin, GPU's have a lot of latent computational power when mining ETH. As a result, most Nanopool workers who mine ETH also mine PASC on-the-side, since Nanopool offers this feature in a very convenient and user-friendly manner.

The introduction of dual-mining into a crypto fundamentally changes the economics and incentives of mining for the "secondary coin” being mined. Let me explain. Ordinarily, a coins mining eco-system grows organically with interest in that coin and centralisation does not tend to occur. This is due to the "hashpower follows price" law. As price grows organically due to interest, so do the number of miners. If there are too many miners, the coin becomes unprofitable, and some miners leave.  This homeostasis between mining, price and eco-system size seems to be part of the magic of Satoshi's miracle economic innovation.

With dual-mining, this is broken. Dual-mining has led to coins with small user-base having a totally disproportionate number of miners who mine the coin even when seemingly "unprofitable". In our case, miners are primarily on Nanopool to mine Ethereum, not PascalCoin. So the number of PascalCoin miners are a function of Ethereum's eco-system, not PascalCoin's eco-system. Also, these miners mine PascalCoin because they have latent computing power, so it technically costs them nothing to mine PascalCoin. This obviously changes the economics since genuine PASC miners are priced-out because it's highly unprofitable and dual-miners mine PASC because it costs them nothing (and then dump it straight away).

Over time, this has resulted in a 99% mining centralisation at Nanopool, yet they are not malicious at all. Due to this centralisation, exchanges are reticent to list PascalCoin because of the theoretical threat posed by this centralisation (rollback PASC deposit after attacker dumps/withdraws BTC). This has blocked our growth. So now we have a situation where miners are actually hurting the coin and it's value, yet their hashpower has made us ultra-secure (notwithstanding selfish-mining-attack).

Anyway, enough with the problem. The solution is either to change the hash algorithm (this effort has failed) or embrace dual-mining rather than fight it. To embrace dual-mining means we need more Ethereum pools offering dual-mining PascalCoin as Nanopool does, that way we can balance out the distribution. Albert has said he'd like to see 4-5 pools mining us again rather than change hash algorithm. I think we can achieve this.

This is where you can help. If you can use your network and resources to facilitate major ETH pools offering their workers PASC dual-mining, in the same manner that Nanopool does, this will solve the problem! Last week, we noticed Zetapool mined a large number of blocks but then stopped. This suggests they were trialing something. Maybe you can start with them and see if they’re willing to open-source their PASC dual-mining updates they made to the open-source ETH pool they are using. Also, you could contact other pool operators and see if they could integrate PASC dual-mining. Your pitch here could include "compete with Nanopool", earn bonus 1%-2% on the side for little extra cost. Sphere 10 Software can offer their devs free technical support/consulting to integrate PASC. The following pools would be a good start f2pool, ethermine, ethfans, miningpoolhub, bitclubpool, dwarfpool, bw, ethpool. You can see top ETH pools here as well https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and assisting if you can.