Congrats again, and hope it was profitable for you!

I haven't merge-mined in a long time, but I remember having to set different RPC ports for each coin. Is that still needed?

Make two paper wallets (or more). Send a small amount of BTC to the first one, then sweep it back into your regular wallet (desktop/mobile/whatever). Once you're confident you know how to get your bitcoins back out, you can send them to the second paper wallet for storage. DO NOT REUSE THE FIRST WALLET! Shred it after you get your bitcoins out.

My thought is, the pod at $60 makes the stick at $35 look a little expensive. I'm thinking the stick would be a gift-type item or an impulse buy, not really for even a small home farm at that price. With a choice between two sticks or one pod for just $25 more, I suspect the pod would get more attention.

As for the pod, I'd be willing to go as high as $90-100, with performance scaled up to match. I remember when the original Erupter sticks came out, they were ballpark $100 a pop, and they sold like gangbusters. Even in today's depressed economy, I feel that would be a good price. It also puts some distance from the stick price, and gives you enough room to work in both more performance and more features.

Just a quick compliment to CK, Kano, and the other cgminer devs. I recently rebuilt my mining rig based on a Raspberry Pi and a few Asicminer Block Erupters I still had. One compilation with appropriate flags later, and cgminer was happily chomping away and telling me I haven't found a block yet! It's pretty impressive to have software continue to work with ancient hardware in an environment as fast-moving as bitcoin. Major props and thanks!

More out of nostalgia than anything else, I broke out my old mining kit (Raspberry Pi and some hubs) and installed a trio of Block Erupters on it. I've got them pointed at the pool now. I figure I have about as much chance of hitting a block with a whopping 1GH/s as I do at winning the gazillion-dollar lottery, but hey, either way it's a dream.

Yeah, we need a better selection of smilies. 

You almost sound sad! 

I was thinking about that when I saw the previous comment. There's got to be some value in trying to build on your own (orphaned) block. It would take someone with far more math and game theory experience than me, though, to work out the correct probabilities and returns. I'm sure someone has already done that, though, privately if not publicly -- and I would be very surprised if the "corporate" pools didn't have some sort of policy in place about that, so as to maximize their return.

For now, downclocking is indeed what I've done. With my batch 1 S9, I have it set at 556 with 40% fan, and it runs about 5 degrees hotter than yours at a steady 11.9GH/s, rarely edging up towards 12GH/s. It's still noisier than I'd like, but it's tolerable at that level.

I posted this earlier in the thread, but I think it got lost in the excitement of new S9s. With the original S1s, there was a mod that worked quite nicely.  You could take them apart and put a 200mm fan on each blade to cool them effectively but silently:

https://imgur.com/a/RUAX5

I did this with my old S1, and it worked amazingly. The miner ran at full speed, with a better temp than the factory fans, and it was totally silent unless you were standing right next to the fans. I'm going to wait another month or so until my warranty expires, then I'm going to try the same thing with my S9. Particularly with the thermal throttling built into the S9s that protects them from overheating, I'm confident this will make for a better mining experience. My only concern is finding another "base" for the third module in the S9s.

Heh. The CPU mining discussion reminded me - I still have some old Block Erupter sticks lying around somewhere. I wonder if it would be worth reviving my "USB mining farm" for a whopping 10GH.    Yes, I know the electricity cost would far exceed any revenue, but there was something comforting about those flickering green lights.

The people running those nodes are hurting themselves, mostly -- but they can hurt others in two ways.

First, their hash rate is effectively lost to the v16 network, meaning the rest of the p2pool users wouldn't get paid if the old-version users hit a block.

Second, they can cause other users who are just rejoining p2pool to join their outdated chain, magnifying the problem. The majority network is now on v16, and rejecting any shares from v15 or earlier. There was a Reddit post a week or two back about a guy who spun up a new p2pool node with a slightly outdated software version (it didn't have the v16-only commit applied yet), got connected to the v15 network, and mined for quite a while wondering why he was getting poor results.

The upshot is that if at all possible, we should try to contact node owners still mining on v15 or earlier and convince them to upgrade.

http://www.thecoinfoundry.com/ - this domain is dead; it now has a "this domain for sale" parking page up.

The downtime appears to have started at around 16:35 UTC. It's been up and down at least once in that interim. Kano is working on it, as posted above.

I invite you to join the rest of us in putting him on ignore. This thread becomes a lot more productive to read that way.

My software is showing the pool went down about 14 minutes before this post.

Blockchain.info is apparently having a parsing error. Check here:

https://blockr.io/block/info/420000

Coinbase transaction value minus block fees = 12.5BTC generated.

Triple confirmed on Bitcoin Classic on Windows. The signing address is the same one used for payouts from Slush.

Is there an existing front-end package that can read the output of the user stats and display it in a more user-friendly format? Essentially, something reads the JSON output from http://solo.ckpool.org/users/1Xabc123whatever and converts it into a pretty table or grid or something, so that the user can monitor performance.

I could write up something like this, but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel if there's something already existing.  However, there wasn't anything listed in the first couple of pages that I saw, and a Google search didn't find anything useful.