Hello,

I just come back from holiday, back from lagging wifi somewhere in Cafe to my working station. I know that my recent step with forced donations was quite controversial and didn't helped to PR of my pool :-). Firstly, many thanks to all of you who understood my situation and supported me here when I was away.

I just want to explain whole story and the reason why I setup fees (I know it isn't "donation" any more, I just re-used existing infrastructure for hot fix).

When I started the pool, there were only few pool members, mainly well known from the Bitcoin community. They sent me some donations for the beginning, later I set up voluntary donations and everything worked well. As pool hashrate went up, many users joined the effort, but they didn't feel they are part of pool community; they just used service which was paid by few first members. Pool was still financial self-sufficient, but I become little unsure if my business model will be still working with many and many newcomers. This is great example of disaster of the common; First users known that donations are needed to run the server and pay me for service support (yes, I'm not Mother Teresa and like to earning bitcoins). But new users just saw that there is cool free service and those already connected players surely pay enough to run the service also for them. So day by day, my earnings from pool dropped, but server resources and also my _time_ for running the service went up significantly, to many hours daily. I'm big Bitcoin fan, but running service for 5 dollars (on current prices) for covering server costs and few hours per day of my time for support and development, become on the edge of worthless.

The big break happen few days ago, when Bitcoin was mentioned in some Internet media. The "disaster of the common" effect become much more significant. The hashrate and server resources (and emails from users!) doubled in ONE DAY and the traffic still increased, but the daily donations dropped. Nobody (except two, three users?) from hundreds from new users set up even 2% donations! I tried to find the source of newcomers, find what was behind the huge step in traffic and found, for example, few Russian warez forums, where Bitcoin and the pool was mentioned as "easy money". This is definitely not what I like, but it fully corresponds with donation numbers which I see in on pool. I definitely don't think it is fair that few Bitcoin fans should support tens or hundreds of users which simply misuse the free service.

So because I was only on poor connection and had only few possibilities, I decided to set up those "minimal donations", fees, to cut down income of those 'unfair' users, to get some extra cash for scalability improvements and more server resources (I will set up second pool server this week, for example). Well, I cannot call the users with 0% donations as 'unfair', because I offer them the possibility of free pool, but the equilibrium of free/paid users changed dramatically in last days. Those problems pushed me to think about business model. Unfortunately, I see that donation model does not work well.

I considered solutions as running pool only for closed group of trusted users, basically the same mode as pool started in December. But I still want to bring the service for the wide consortium of users, because that was my big idea when I started my work on the service. I'm really enjoying people that wrote me they are happy with cents per day using their CPUs and see that they are supporting me with 6%. I definitely don't want to cut them from the pool, just because some of them are not such honest and don't want to pay even 0.001 from their 0.025 daily reward.

So I decided to keep fees on the pool up, just lower them from current 2% to 1%. I'm sure that cut of 1% (0.5 BTC from every 50BTC block) is far under anything which can be really recognized on user's daily reward. This is enough to run pool for all users without judging their motivation and without asking. I also remove 'voluntary donations' option, which effectively make pool cheaper for users which voluntarily supported service until now. I would like to say big THANK YOU for all of you which set up donations in times when it was really voluntary and I hope that users like the service enough to don't care about the minimal fees.

I will make this change in this week. But before this, I'll finish mass mailing of users to communicate this change better, few days in advance, than last change in fees. Once again, I'm sorry for the way how I did the communication few days before.