I reviewed the changes. Looks to be OK. Besides adding X16, there were a few minor changes to X17.

I too prefer zpool. It's just a guy with some kids working hard each day to make a living. When people hit him up on discourse, he works hard to fix their problems. It's nice to have a pool run buy an ordinary hardworking guy you can contact.

Another fun point about the 1070ti cards. Buy the cheapest ones you can. Performance is identical comparing the most expensive founders edition super extra cool blower fan unit and 9 temp sensors with the most basic. I am running the zotac mini as it needs only 1 plug.

I have an 8 card 1070ti rig after very carefully analyzing profit and ROI. The 1080ti is 24% on average more profitable (at 33% more cost based on your numbers). I calculated the RX570 cards as 12% less profitable and their resale was about 40% less. Over Christmas I babysat a RX570 rig (12 cards) and it made about 25% less than my 1070ti rig and took more power too. I'm not sure why it was so much lower than my calculations, but the 1070ti remains the best choice right now. It just doesn't make sense to buy them for another 2-3 weeks until the first few major shipments of cards arrive from asia. Now I just wish I'd find a container full of those on the shoreline...

You can use TOR. All the traffic going from your tor router to the ISP will be encrypted. If you have access to a remote unix host you can usually run an SSH tunnel for the connection. That's what I did when electroneum blocked all of OVH since I run a server farm there and was using spare cycles to mine cryptonight.

6k seemed to be a hard floor for many. While I didn't fact check, I was told someone made a $7,000,000 buy order around $6k. You can imagine at some point they will be selling, having made a very healthy return. Looking at other years, BTC typically made a recovery by the second week of February. Looks like we just need to wait it out a little more.

I don't have a dog in this fight as I mine all the pools, but I do think the OP was pretty accusatory. You often see posts claiming this pool and that pool are skimming 20% off the top. I'm heavy into analyzing how things work, and I highly doubt anyone could get away with that having such a long running and popular pool. Take 10,000 miners on a specific pool, more guys like me are going to have written tools to watch and analyze their earnings. It would have been better to simply ask what a specific thing is. Both explanations posted make perfect sense to me.

Having worked on optimizing databases most of my career, I am curious to know what sort of backend databases projects like zpool use? It's understandable that the system is slammed with such an influx of NH users. I just hope zpool has their security shit together

Understandable. You can similarly bitch at a company like Walmart for destroying brick and mortar type businesses, but everyone is just playing inside the constraints of the market. I'm disappointed for the lack of proper security and asset compartmentalization, they dropped the ball in a big way. For that, NH needs to be taken to task.

However, some of the comments here are a bit like victim blaming. If a hot woman is wearing a skimpy outfit, it doesn't justify her being raped. The rapists still need to be brought to justice. NH didn't deserve to be robbed. These thieves ultimately stole from miners like you and I. I don't think of NH as hot woman, but I hope next time she comes packing some good defence. (Tasers and guns? Dad with a shotgun? Maybe...)

I don't know that much about how it's done, since I'm a bit new to this gig, but I switched to minergate and their numbers didn't seem to add up with the amount of hashing my systems are producing. A discrepancy of about 30%. I'm not saying they're doing something crooked, but I switched to some different pools and the numbers match up against my calculated stats again. Maybe it's a difference in the reporting, but I remain suspicious.

Instead of making useless comments, perhaps you could explain why the system cannot be used to track the stolen coin? It seems that users were quite successful in watching where it went from the nicehash wallet.

I don't know much about the inner workings of bitcoin, but they know what wallet the stolen coins went into and where they went from there. Is it impossible to black-list the tainted coins/wallets? If every single transaction is in a ledger, then wouldn't every single coin be traceable?

I hope it's fake, but with the transfer of 4000btc out of their wallet visible to everyone, you'd think if this was just a part of their maintenance there would be some clarification tweeted. It is possible that there is a very legitimate explanation - maybe they are converting the holdings/payouts system over to a different storage - but it really does look and feel like a game-ending hack.

Up in the frozen wasteland to the north of you I'm paying about  $0.065/kwh (converted to USD for you). The cooling is provided by mother nature for 6 months of the year and a small collection of cards is heating my home. To the south (the area where you're at) it really doesn't seem to make any sense dealing with the high costs of power and cooling. I feel like Quebec (Canada) is probably ideal because there is so much cheap hydro and as you go North it gets cooler - although not too far north or your internet will suck. Commercially, demand metered I had my own phase converter and was paying about $0.02/kwh. Not free, but almost.

I've been buying up different versions of the cards just playing around with what I think is a cheaper and better watercooling solution and I've learned that many of the cards are nearly identical. I've never really worked in that industry, but it feels like everyone took a pre-plotted reference design and just customized the heat sinks because my water block design bolts up to more than one brand of card perfectly.