Greetings Eligius miners,
So, a few quick things.
First, I would like to point out that Eligius has done what it could to mitigate
today's spam attack against bitcoin. While most pools/miners were mining blocks jam packed full of the attacker's spam, Eligius was working to mine blocks full of legitimate transactions that were being delayed by the attacker. We did successfully mine
a full block with 2,739 non-spam transactions during the attack, and there was much rejoicing. We've also mined a second spam-free block that appears to better reflect actual legitimate transaction volume, also.
Second, I've been updating some internal things for Eligius. Most notably you'll notice we're finally in the cool kids group and are mining v3 blocks. The back end servers that handle block creation have gotten a bit of an overhaul and are working better than ever.
Next, you may or may not have noticed that the starting share difficulty on Eligius is now 512. This should help with some mining hardware/software that was having problems with the difficulty 128 starting shares. Over 85% of the pool was or should have been already mining shares at 512 or higher automatically, due to variable difficulty. The remaining minority will not be adversely affected. Essentially, if you were not mining at a speed fast enough to get shares higher than 128 before this change, then you would be mining less than 0.038 BTC per month (less than $10 worth at current rates) and may very well want to double check that mining is still right for you...
I'm continuing with the back end migration and updates and am working to make sure everything is as painless as possible. So seamless that most won't even notice all of the hard work I've been doing.
As always, thanks for mining!
-wk
