We wanted to follow up on some discussions about exchange trades that were being done at low prices, and the question as to why amounts were being sold so far below the lowest current ask offers.

We did some digging and found that one pool in particular, zpool.ca, is currently mining a significant amount of blocks and the rewards are being automatically sold at regular intervals on exchanges far below the lowest asking price.

We don't believe that there's any malicious or damaging intent by the pool, but rather, it's just the result of lazy automation and the fact that they exchange mined rewards for BTC as quickly as possible -  no is one looking at the spread, nor making informed decisions. It's not a natural buying/selling process, in fact it's basically a selling bot - and the problem is compounded by overall low volume.

We've requested that zpool remove us from their pool, but they may not choose to co-operate so we're looking at other options that would help mitigate or eliminate the effect they're having.

One potential solution we are considering, is selecting an established pool that does NOT do automatic payouts in BTC - and setting up a promotion to encourage users to switch away from "damaging" pools such as zpool, and join our selected pool. Right now bsod provides a significant amount of the hash power, so they would be the obvious choice.

A second option would be to setup our own official pool with 0% fees. We would handle the operations and expenses of this pool and it would be not-for-profit. If a fee were ever added, the full amount would be donated to charities.

We'd love to get community feedback on either of these approaches.