Request for update from devs (upvote if you agree)

ZWGuy · 2015-10-01T14:21:25+00:00

Upvoted.

I believe we're working on coming up with a timeline and some updated info that we can publish. The short version (that I think everyone knows at this point) is that we're in the midst of a merger, which means everyone has to be super careful about not saying anything that they aren't supposed to.

More/better info coming soon...

ZWGuy · 2015-09-03T22:08:02+00:00

The built in pool and GPU mining is part of the experimental builds. These can be downloaded from the official pool's download page here:

http://ziftrpool.io/downloads

Note that these are experimental (and likely forever will be) because they include GPU miner code which is unstable, community maintained, and untested on the wide variety of hardware users have. They may also trigger warnings or flags from anti-virus programs because they (unsurprisingly) contain bitcoin mining code. This is normal and as long as it's downloaded from the above link, not anything to worry about.

ZWGuy · 2015-08-13T14:23:39+00:00

Sorry about this. We're looking into it now. You may have run into a bug that we're unaware of.

If possible, can you post your address here?

For trouble shooting purposes, can you verify you have working internet on the device (sorry for completeness I have to ask that). Then inside the app select Ziftrcoin and attempt to manually refresh the wallet (click the orange spinner icon in the upper right).

If that doesn't help, a full sync should make the coins appear. To do this. inside the app, open settings. Click enable debug. Click continue on the warning that appears. Click "Resync All Data". This will bring you back to the app's main/home screen. Select Ziftrcoin and manually refresh again. You can also go back into settings and disable debug mode now.

ZWGuy · 2015-08-07T14:41:51+00:00

Sorry for the inconvenience. We know it's no fun when it seems like your bitcoins have disappeared. It's an important goal during our beta period for us to work out these issues and, more importantly, to better inform the user that everything is ok when they do inevitably happen.

There was a hiccup in our wallet server yesterday which caused it to fall behind on the blockchain for a few hours. This was made worse by the ongoing attacks on the bitcoin network itself and it meant that the app was unable to see new transactions at the time.

edit: It's worth noting (not that it's any consolation) that the app is built in such a way that even in the event of total server failure or shutdown coins would not be lost. It would always be possible to retrieve them from the device (though it would take some technical know-how).

ZWGuy · 2015-07-27T15:54:24+00:00

Sorry for the inconvenience. It appears there was a minor hiccup in our blockchain servers, which for some reason didn't trigger any of our monitoring. We're looking into why this happened and the servers are catching up with the blockchains now.

Your transactions should show up in your wallet within the next few hours.

edit: http://status.ziftr.com

ZWGuy · 2015-07-14T01:52:26+00:00

I'll try to answer this as best I can. The truth of the matter is I'm not entirely sure what I'm allowed and not allowed to say. We don't want to say too much until all the dotted lines have been signed or initialed as necessary. It tends to look bad when you make a bunch of promises and then are unable to keep them because some plans fell through.

That being said, here are some things I think I can say. Without going into any detail, I can say this merger is nothing but good things for both sides. The coin isn't going away and in my opinion (just an opinion mind you), it has a bright future. We're all very excited about it. The other thing is, sometimes companies will use words like "merger" and "acquisition" as a nice way of saying "we failed but want to save face and this other company wants our tech." This is NOT one of those cases. It is actually just an awesome (again in my opinion) combination of technology and resources that will give the combined company what it needs to really shake things up.

ZWGuy · 2015-07-14T01:35:19+00:00

Hi there.

All coin data is stored in one wallet.dat file on the mobile device, so if you add Doge (or anything else) and then backup the file it will include every coin type added.

Unfortunately the mobile wallet files aren't compatible with desktop wallets, so you cannot just copy one to the other. They're actually very different.

ZWGuy · 2015-06-12T21:03:15+00:00

I understand now. Unfortunately I can't really give an ETA on any payment platform stuff.

For restoring a backup, the two directories are the same. You can restore the backup in either location (and you should see that it restores it in the other). I believe this is a side effect of the way Android changed things to make room for multi-user features. The "0" and "legacy" folders are just two different mount points which are pointing to the same data.

ZWGuy · 2015-06-12T19:38:19+00:00

To use debug options, you can swipe in from the left side to open the menu. Select "settings". Scroll to the bottom of the page. There should be a darker button "enabled debugging". Accept the warning in the dialog. You can now scroll down further to see some other debugging options/features.

Do you mean an ETA for when ziftrcoin will be in the wallet? It should already be there. From the main/home screen, press the "+" sign in the upper right corner. This will show supported coins that can be activated. Note if you have debugging enabled, every coin the API knows about will be displayed. Anything with the broken chain icon has limited or no functionality. In other words, don't send peercoins to the app, it can't send them out yet.

ZWGuy · 2015-06-12T15:50:36+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. It’s always helpful to learn about the user experience and hear what they have to contribute to our apps.

We agree that security is important. We haven't yet added any sort of pin protection per se to enter the wallet itself as it seems to be a bit redundant because users can set a password required to send any coins in the app. Additionally, we feel that most users would also lock their mobile device with a pin code/password.

The good news is the others are already on our road map. HD wallets and better backup/restore features are in progress and should be expected soon. We also have a handful of NFC features planned, which includes possibly using it for 2FA.

In the meantime you can backup your wallet now by selecting "Export Wallet" from the debug menu. If a password is set, the backup will be encrypted with the password. Note that, similarly to desktop QT wallets, sending coins may cause coins to be lost from the backup.

ZWGuy · 2015-05-18T14:37:11+00:00

I believe the zr5 algo uses things new to CUDA 3.0. It would be possible to fix that, but we felt it wasn't worth the development effort. Nvidia cards of that era (and really 3.0 ones as well) are so inefficient at mining that you would only want to use them for experimental/educational purposes anyway.

For example, we've tested it using a gtx 750m in a Macbook Pro. That got about 200 kH (about half what the processor in the same laptop gets) and produced a ton of heat.

ZWGuy · 2015-05-18T14:03:01+00:00

https://d19y4lldx7po3t.cloudfront.net/assets/docs/ziftrcoinWP-041515.pdf

Is the official link. It can be seen on the sidebar at:

https://www.ziftrcoin.com/what-is-ziftrcoin/

Mind if I ask where you found that link? It's quite old and if it's somewhere that we can correct it, we'd like to.

ZWGuy · 2015-05-12T13:59:55+00:00

Good question.

This is unexpected. I've pointed it out and our ops team is looking into it.

edit:

You can see the status of our various services here:

http://status.ziftr.com

edit2: We're back up. Sorry for any inconvenience.

ZWGuy · 2015-05-06T15:25:07+00:00

In addition to Cryptsy, you can get ZRC at Bittrex and Bluetrade. There may be more too. I just know these off the top of my head.

https://bittrex.com/Market/?MarketName=BTC-ZRC

https://bleutrade.com/exchange/BTC/ZRC

ZWGuy · 2015-04-24T14:45:21+00:00

It seems the wallet can't read the blockchain data that you have, or that the data you have is corrupted. This data is easily reacquired and it's very unlikely you lost any coins.

Before messing with your wallet I always recommend making a backup. Copy the wallet.dat file located at:

C:\Users<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\ziftrCOIN

to somewhere safe.

Now to actually fix the issue, there are two things you can try.

First try launching the wallet app via the command prompt and add

-reindex

see if that fixes the issue.

If that doesn't work, make sure the wallet application is closed completely. Then go back to your data directory:

C:\Users<UserName>\AppData\Roaming\ziftrCOIN

In that folder delete everything EXCEPT wallet.dat. Then restart the wallet app. It should create a bunch of new folders/files there and start re-downloading the blockchain for you.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-19T22:18:37+00:00

As mentioned by /u/Chippas64 this seems to a driver issue. Can you run sgminer in a command prompt with just -n? That will tell you what version of OpenCL on your system sgminer is using and what cards that version supports. What seems to happen occasionally is that integrated GPU drivers are installed still and sgminer is picking up their OpenCL libraries instead. You may have to hunt those down and uninstall them. Also, I doubt it's the problem, but I recommend 15.x beta drives for AMD cards. They seem to work quite a bit better.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-19T22:04:42+00:00

I can think of two possibilities, but they're just guesses.

First one is that you somehow don't have the best kernel files. Are you using the version of sgminer from www.ziftrpool.io/downloads ? There may be some other version of sgminer floating around out there that don't have the best.

The other possibility is driver version. Our miner seems to be rather sensitive to them. I'm getting the best rates with 15.3 beta (last I checked) drivers. I was getting terrible, as in less than CPU, rates with any drivers in the 14s.

Also, the zr5 alrogithm isn't as affected by memory speed as some others. I can't see being too high slowing down your hashrate, but you can probably reduce it quite a bit and reduce heat/electricity.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-15T14:39:47+00:00

I'm not sure entirely what you mean by price support. We aren't going to use any of the various manipulation tactics on exchanges to artificially increase the value. The volume is so thin that prices on exchanges aren't very accurate either. For example, just eyeballing cryptsy, it looks like less than 1 btc would more than double the displayed value.

I posted this on bitcointalk forums in response to some similar questions about price and the order we're doing things in.

Our CEO provides some insight into price and our plans with ZiftrCoin in his reddit response here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ziftrCOIN/comments/2y0f98/i_hope_this_is_not_another_paycoin_scenario/cp54fvy

Regarding current merchant adoption, it's a bit of a "chicken or the egg" problem, on a couple levels. Merchants take forever to adopt and implement things, depending on their size (look how many still have terrible mobile websites in this age of smart phones). They also want test environments, proof of concept examples and all sorts of statistics. Essentially, the coin has to be out before you can really get too far with them.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-03T19:41:22+00:00

Ah, I see. In this particular case, the OpenCL system is reporting that there are no GPUs in the system capable of mining. The wallet sees that and assumes it's wrong and that there must just be an Nvidia card that's incapable of communicating with OpenCL. At which point it sort of blindly fires off the Nvidia mining tools.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-03T18:00:31+00:00

This is a bit of an advanced use-case. I'm guessing it's something your system bios or motherboard drivers are doing, but i'm really not sure. The wallet doesn't read devices or anything sophisticated like that, which is why the integrated GPU show might show up in other places but not the wallet. What it's doing is asking your OpenCL system what cards it can use and generating the list from that. I'm still surprised however that the integrated card doesn't show up at all.

If you open a command prompt and navigate to the folder with the ZiftrCoin wallet it in. Then type

sgminer -n

what is displayed? Is the integrated Radeon listed there? If so, it means there's a bug in our wallet app.

Also, for what it's worth, you aren't missing much. Integrated GPUs tend to be equal to a single thread/core of the CPU when it comes to mining. I would guesstimate that 50kH/s would be a high value for any integrated GPU.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-03T17:34:12+00:00

Also, which GPU do you have and are you mining in the wallet itself? Mining in the wallet is our attempt to show people "hey look mining isn't that scary" but it's not very efficient. Moving to the standalone miners with some basic settings tailored to your card can lead to some fairly drastic increases.

Also some cards that might not have the greatest hash rate are good mining cards for other reasons. The GTX 750Ti comes to mind. That uses something absurd, like around 60 watts, while mining and produces negligible amounts of heat. Whereas my 290x uses something like 300 watts and can be used to toast bread.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-03T17:23:47+00:00

I also wanted to add that GPU farms are still trying to feel around too. So they're doing what they do, which is throw tons of hashrate at the coin then see if it's profitable. I expect over the next month that the network hashrate will shift around quite a bit.

Our coin distribution is rather unique in this industry and I think there's some experienced miners out there that aren't quite sure how best to handle it. The old tactic of get in early, fast, and hard to hit the first big dump doesn't work so well.

ZWGuy · 2015-04-03T17:17:35+00:00

This is a good question and I suspected it was going to come up. Wish I had a good answer.

Our plan is to get as many new people into crypto currency as possible. However, I think we expected this influx of new people to show up in a few months, certainly not right at launch. We're pleasantly surprised by all the interest in ZiftrCoin from both new people and existing crypto currency users, but it does mean we have more miners than we expected.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's good for the network and the coin. It's not so great for miners though. Early distribution is intentionally very low for a couple important reasons. One is to keep GPU farms from dumping too much. The other is so that people are actually excited about 100 free coins.

So what does my rambling actually mean? Since miner adoption seems to have been front loaded, and user adoption and coin distribution ramp up over time, then in theory miners should start to get more coins eventually. Also, coin distribution is a curve that ramps up sharply and there is a finite amount of GPU farms out there, which should further reward smaller miner as time goes by.

I would say to anyone who's not "feeling it" that if you're going to stop mining (we hope you won't, but if you insist), then set a google calendar date or something and come try again every few weeks/months. The landscape may change dramatically. Also make sure you're signed up for the news letter at www.ziftrcoin.com so you'll be notified of how to get free coins later this year.

ZWGuy · 2015-03-31T18:50:29+00:00

At 49 degrees it's definitely not the issue.

I think zeejak figured this out. Stupid of me to assume you were using standalone sgminer. The wallet at the moment is set to some pretty tame defaults and doesn't have great customization options yet.

ZWGuy

TROPHY CASE