All of this "suspended account", log submission and detailed analysis seems to be without any rational purpose:  if a client sends an "invalid" share wouldn't it be dramatically easier to simply reject it on the spot and move on?

It also stands to reason that even if there was a legitimate purpose for suspending accounts, the suspension should be across the board:  both payout and share submission should be disabled.  Leaving share submission in place while payout is explicitly disabled is getting very close to a "crime resembling theft".

Nobody knows.

The excuses from Minergate staff are, for lack of a better word, lame:  "Billing system is down for maintenance.  We are updating daemons, and our crack team of theoretical physicists are re-wring the Jefferies tubes to be in better quantum coherence."  (Which part am I joking about?)

This all might be vaguely possible -- Can it be true they have yet to learn the need to have separate development and production systems? -- but it is very strange and ominous that that money-in system (mining, block finding) never seems to go down "for maintenance" while the money-out system (withdrawal) one has never worked reliably.

On the plus side, I finally managed to get my funds out.  Took about a week.  A friend has also extracted his funds as well -- but only after a much longer delay, obfuscation and silence.

I can think of some unsavory reasons why Minergate is acting the way it is, but I ultimately have no evidence one way or the other.  All I know is that while Minergate claims they are the most profitable pool -- maybe they are! -- and they do have very nice software, but whatever is the point if you can't get your money out on demand?

So we won't be going back until we hear that Minergate has implemented near real-time automatic payouts, like every other pool does, and that, out of basic fairness to pool members, if the payout system goes down, they so does the mining system.  Let them swim in a pool of pain with the rest of us...

I think minergate should start streaming the audio to The Eagle's "Hotel California" every time someone clicks on the withdraw button.

Just cue it to start playing at the point where he sings:

"You can check out any time you like,
 but you can never leave!"

(I don't want to sound nasty or negative here, so I'll only mention that it has been over a week now, and minergate still refuses to release my BCN "profits".  I am personally aware of another case where minergate refuses to release millions of duck and other funds -- ie, real money at the present time.  Patience has almost worn out at this point -- does minergate even _have_ the funds anymore? -- but I remain hopeful that some day the people who run minergate will surprise me.)

AMD 9590, 4.43 GHz/core (i.e., lame, conservative clocking) provides ~280 H/s with 8 cores with minerd;  bytecoind will get 270.  Performance scales reasonably as cores are added/removed, and core temperatures are not an issue (push-pull liquid cooler keeps mine at 36C under full load).

Results with an old Intel i7 2600K series show that performance does not scale beyond 4 threads:  I observed about 100 H/s at 8 threads, and 145 H/s at 4 threads.  In other words, less is more.  This may or may not apply to later model Intel devices, and experimentation is suggested.

While I _strongly_ suggest only the use of devices that implement the AES-NI instructions, that old non-AES accelerated Intel thing has yanked a few blocks, so it's not like it is completely useless.