The blockchain is running fine. All you have to do to confirm this is to look at the block explorer. I have a small miner set up to solo mine when the diff drops too low, just to keep the chain moving along.

The pools at Lifeforce have had these issues before; where the pool fails to respond or gets bogged down and takes forever to load. I've had my miners switch to a failover (backup) pool many times while mining there. Hence, why I have my miner set-up to solo Octo, now.

I'm not sure about the securepayment.cc pool. I tried to mine a couple of different coins there in the past and have had issues with pool stability and not getting credited for the blocks I have found.

Your best bet, if you want to add some coins over the next five days or just help keep the chain moving is to solo mine. Even with low hash power you can probably pick up a few blocks here and there. At one point, my blade (mining at 5.7 MH/s) was picking up 65%+ of all the blocks being found.

Here's a sample config file to be placed in your (user/name/AppData/roaming/OctoCoin) folder if you want to solo mine:


Replace the username/userpassword with something of your choosing and keep your wallet open while mining.


EDIT: Looks like the Lifeforce Octo pool is now offline as it is still slow loading but is now showing this error on the pool stats page:

Unable to connect to wallet RPC service: RPC call failed: Recv failure: Connection reset by peer

Looks like the wallet crashed there...