It IS working. Only recently did he get enough delegate pay voted in to start development necessary to make it profitable (at which time paid delegates will no longer be necessary and can be voted out without negative effect). Please continue to vote for this very promising project so it can reach its potential. It has the potential to benefit us all (except newmine, lol).
How much more delegate pay does it need to be profitable?
What is it still missing that is making it unprofitable? It seems to be fully functional.
Isnt it just the case that miners are just not interested in being paid in BitUSD, for the reason I just described?
It's a zero fee pool with a bonus. There is zero opportunity for profitability in that scenario. What makes it more difficult to be profitable is paying out in bitUSD. Our payout process has to pass from alts to BTC and then to bitUSD, and all along the way all the exchanges are taking their cuts of transaction charges and spreads. Servers and network resources are not being supported at all other than out of pocket by me. On top of that the pool requires at least 2 hours a day of maintenance.. again not paid for.
It started out as a personal initiative by nethyb who took it upon himself to over the course of months piece together a mining pool to support bitshares. He did everything in his spare time.. he is not a programmer but he's a smart guy so he essentially kept working at stuff until it worked.
The pool only supports scrypt and x11 at present, and there are a lot more miners in sha256 and other alt protocols that are more profitable now like quark and WhisperX for example.
In order to move forward effectively the platform the current pool was built on is now outdated and it was so heavily customized for bitshares we don't have much choice but to build a whole new core and foundations in order to move forward in any effective way.
If you go to the links mentioned in this thread I have gone into a fair amount of details about how to take the pool from losing to profitability. I recommend checking them out. Essentially the combination of some innovative mining methods combined with the BunkerDEX are going to enable us to move to being competitive and profitable.
However, it has not grown only because of the fundamentals we simply do not have to be competitive right now. Consistently profitability being top of the list. Miners move to where they can make the most money.. and the current processes don't enable us to be able to be consistent enough. Because we need to get updates done to automate our payouts, and make profits consistent, and enable us to reach other miners in sha256, we haven't made any major push to promote the pool in its current state.. simply because we would only be creating a turn and burn situation.. not unlike our current situation where people are not referring people to bitshares because of client issues with current 1.0 version.. they are waiting for the shiny new 2.0 to show everyone.. so are we for the mining pool.
We also got a bit of a branding issue to overcome. Part of why when we get the new pool launched it will be rebranded to BunkerMining. It is still going to be completely powered by payouts only in BitShares/bitAssets. Later Phase 3 development will move us further into being more like a Nicehash for BitShares.
There is a clear path to sustainability.. and in the threads referenced showed the tremendous value that this mining pool brings to BitShares. With the updates we are getting done, we could really give a boost to all the bitasset markets with lots of liquidity, volume, and users. I have given a breakdown of how much each miner is worth to this project in the thread here:
https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,18253.0.htmlHope that gives you a clearer picture of where things are at and where we are going.
Finally..
http://vote.bunkermining.com !!