My thought that you must try to think what your target to build a new blockchain. There is a project that builds the blockchain from scratch. you must complete what's purpose of your blockchain. If that's only to grab your investor money and forget it. you must come with something new rather than to do the similar way with another project.

Please ask yourself this before you start your project: will this currency fulfill a need that isn't already fulfilled by one of the thousands of other cryptos? I doubt the answer will be yes.

the community needs to do more about the concentration of the hashrate in one pool. i'm not sure what the best way to do it would be. it's obvious miners won't switch to other pools individually if there is no concerted effort. that would mean potentially sacrificing their rewards. however, if there is a concerted effort to move hashrate from MPH to, let's say, suprnova, then more people would switch over.

is anyone else concerned about this? let's do something about it.

I'm a big fan of suprnova.  For a few reason, they have been around the longest and I trust that they will run a solid pool moving into the new year and beyond.

Wow I only realized today that MPH has almost the complete hash power of Zcoin. Now moved to MintPond to see how it works...

The main problem is that there's basically no communication at all from the devs - the znodes were introduced with several changes to the mining consensus:
Mandatory payments to the nodes directly from the pool became necessary where the protocol would reject blocks without those payments immediately.
Usually you introduce such protocol changes to the protocol but don't enforce them at first so every (pool) can make sure they meet the specs and get it running and also do some testing if the transition etc works fine and then you enforce those payments.

Also you should meet some general consensus when integrating such payments into the "getblocktemplate" call but here it was introduced in a uncommon manner and in a non-standard way - which would have clearly could have been done a lot better if there would have been communication before (and after). There are for example still some issues here where MN addresses are changing quickly requiring an update to the template (which is why you see super-long rounds on other pools sometimes) which could be addressed from the coin side by accepting mn payments to the address before the actual address for a transition period (like it's done in dash where all the code for the masternodes come from..). It can also be fixed from the pools side but once you have enough hash you simply don't care about such things anymore i guess

Next thing is that I was encouraged or a little "forced" to ban botnets a while back with the algo change in mind and with the idea to decentralize the coin - which is a good idea as the botnets are simply controlled by one person who gets the big chunk. However the botnet just moved to a different pool which is not against botnets at all so they keep away hashing fine there and the integration of mtp is also not prioritized .. So it's a fun situation here.. Be fair or be square :-)

At last the pool was simply not profitable anymore because with 2-3 blocks per day with 0% fee it's always hard to keep it running as pools always require some maintenance. The pool would need at least 15% of the nethash (with 1% fee) to keep it pay for itself.

At last a loyal (DCR) miner helped me to keep the server for the pool running and everything is ok however i'm not in par with the devs/shills of the coin.

Now lets talk about commitment I guess I'm actually a bit overcommited to such things and thats why I'm actually still a bit pissed with the sloppiness (nice said) here.

I've removed the message already, it's not closing

1. You could call this coin ZentralCoin since it's the most centralized coin out there, I don't know any other coin more centralized than this in questions of hash and coin distribution / masternodes.