Quote from: Caesium on November 01, 2011, 01:32:12 AM

Closing down the pool (yes, again).

Two main reasons:
a) I believe bitcoin is dying a slow protracted death, with falling hashrates and falling values it's only a matter of time before it's gone entirely.
b) we had server issues which led to the outage earlier on today, but believed them to be fixed - sadly not and we're now at a state where the pool server won't boot properly, and given my position on a) I'm not willing to invest any more time in fixing this and carrying on running it just to have it all for nothing in what I suspect may be a matter of weeks.

There was one block which hadn't confirmed yet, once it has I'll get it paid out. All remaining balances will be paid out.

It ain't coming back this time, thanks for the hashes over the past few months.

While I understand your position, if you're basing this decision on "bitcoin is dying" I'd recommend you reconsider. Bitcoin is returning back to a reasonable value, and the latest difficulty adjustments show that. Difficulty will -always- lag behind the price curve, since it's calculated reactively to the changes over the last 2 weeks, rather than as a prediction.

Every pool op has felt the pressure as the prices shrink, the problems rise, and the difficulty seems too slow at catching up to a reasonable level. Obviously at these prices/difficulty, 0% is basically impossible. Over the next few months you will likely see the majority of free pools either close, or change to fee structures. Perhaps you should try implementing a fee and trying to keep your presence known? If you play your cards right, who knows what position you'd be in if we see another bubble 6 months down the road?