Hey guys!

So today was an exciting day for Black Coin and for Black Coin Pool, we finished our first part of the closed beta.

As you may know from our twitter/irc, we have successfully ran for 24 hours. Pay outs went out for the first time, we are working towards streamlining and HEAVILY improving Payout system tomorrow.

We are currently pretty much ready to go open beta, the only thing stopping us right now, is that the team is exhausted (8 AM eastern here, some of our guys pulled 14-15 hours today.) Since we want to closely monitor open beta and have staff on hand to mitigate any issues, we have decided to postpone Open Beta till some time Sunday-- however we do plan on running it for all of next week in open mode (this may change, but right now this is the plan.)

We have also started work on our very special algo for coin choosing and determining profitability. Currently most tools to determine profitability are very primitive and don't take the actual market in to account, as well as the pools effect on the coin, and a few other variables that I can't talk to much about yet. We believe this algorithm will not only be unique and proprietary to our pool, but also will give us a clear and distinct advantage over other multipools. This coupled with our automated trading algo, will we believe set us apart from other pools. We will explain this more and more as we get closer to official launch.

We are still performing rapid iterative development, we have done things on the backend such as re-write the pay out calculation script, a new console for us, constant coin and config tweaking, constant bug squashes and a ton of tweaking to coin choosing. To give you an idea, our private Git repo is around 96 commits on the master branch, and it's increasing rapidly every day.

The server continues to perform admirably, it hasn't even began to think about breaking a sweat. Our heavy optimization so far is paying off, we look forward to seeing how it scales with open beta.

Our 2 new developers have dived in are getting very familiar with the project, and have made a flurry of changes. As always fearless Dev Leader St. Gnu is provided guidance and steering the team at a brisk pace.

As you "invite-only" beta people may have noticed, we have updated the Frontend on the server (ooooh shiny.) Please log any problems to IRC staff. Preferably send problems to either @TheDogeOfWallSt on irc or @fitty or @soepkip - we will make sure the dev team will become aware. Tomorrow we will also be starting a public git repo so that we can publicly keep track of issues, and the community can contribute.

We are aware of the current hashrate bloat issue, and are looking at implementing our own custom solution to calculate a more sane hash rate. This is a little trickier than you guys think, so it might take a little time.

Regarding Sha256, we are aiming for a Sha roll out on Monday or Tuesday.

I think this should pretty much cover it, as always a shout out to our amazing community, and thank you to all the amazing beta testers for your patience and support. You are what really drives us to want to make this project succeed and triumph. Seriously, the closed beta has been such a nice experience so far for the team.

Sorry for the wall of text

Tl;Dr - Closed tests went superb, first pay outs got paid, open beta slightly delayed because team needs sleep. Also some stuff about our upcoming trading/choosing algorithms oh and also 1BC = 1BTC or die trying.

Cheers,