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-Official Update from LDG-

As most of you know, during the most recent round of beta we uncovered a fairly important problem. At around the 12hour mark it was discovered that our database was not writing all of the share allocation to miners. This of course, is the only method by which we can allocate level of work and hashrate to each individual miner. In essence, the database wasn't functioning appropriately and failed to handle the volume of miners. At low volumes (beta phase one) things "generally" wrote appropriately to the database. From a high level view they looked solid but we did receive a few concerns about incorrect payout amounts. We listened to you and took notes and that prompted this identification earlier today. Once we opened up and began to accept over 200 users the system began to bloat the DB as the addresses were being repopulated over and over. In essence, the DB freaked out and pulled an Aurora coin. (Crashed...but still stayed alive technically....) 

As we began to manage concerns raised by individuals in the community we double checked our logic but we failed to see the database issue (since it didn't really reveal itself until this morning). So we took it upon ourselves to personally address payout concerns. In effect, we paid out over 2 bitcoin worth of coins from our personal wallets (at the BC valuation of 4500 satoshi). (Given the problems with the DB, some people who received payouts yesterday got more than their appropriate share, so we covered those as well as some extra) Please note, that at the time of this communication; the team has hired on three additional developers and devoted ourselves to this effort nearly non-stop since we inherited it. Beyond that, we took an additional loss when we sent money to affected customers. We love you guys, but these costs are beginning to hurt a bit. (We have made zero income to date) Please don't view this as a wavering of our resolve though; rather I bring it up to simply clarify that we are heavily devoted and committed to seeing this work well. We are going above and beyond to ensure the community trusts us, and we hope that you stick with us through this all.

Please remember, this is beta, and issues like this are actually great to identify before open launch. As we inherited the code, we believe that some of these issues may have been present prior to us getting our hands in it. We are glad we are able to address it, and we are actively working to do so. To facilitate that, we hired an additional resource today (brings us to 4 additional devs supporting gnu) to focus on the DB issue. Please note that the team is aggressively working on this problem at this moment. We will be upgrading the database tonight (they are actively doing it) so absent any unforseen issues we will be ready to test again relatively soon.

Ok, so now what. Well, going forward please note that this is still the beta phase. We definitely need the concurrent connections to test, and as we have demonstrated, we will ensure that payouts happen. That being said, we are unable to absorb consistent losses like we have been. We will be focusing our funds on the project and team. If there is an issue with share allocation during the rest of this beta we will address it via the following solution: Rolling it forward. We will also use this solution regarding the coins received during the 12 hour period where our database did not write allocations.

Here's how it will work: The coins mined will be converted to BTC and then to BC. The BC will be allocated and added to the next beta pool set. Essentially, proceedes from the "12 hours of pain" will be distributed to the miners of the next phase. As we do not have information on who connected or submitted shares we believe that this is the most fair way to distribute the funds. (As the time period is limited -12 hours- we don't think this is an egregious ask)
As mentioned above, this is beta. Sometimes things happen and the best thing (we think) that we can do is to be fully transparent and honest with the community. We will continue to do that and we appreciate you guys sticking with us for this ride. 

Please follow us on twiter: @blackcoinpool or msg us directly in Freenode IRC #blackcoinpool - @adarkvox, @TheDogeOfWallSt, @gnu_user, @fitty. (We have so far managed to have almost 24 hour presence in IRC, and have been communicating with the community non stop.)

Thanks all.

-LDG