17 Goodbye HHTT. The coinbase will never be as strange again.

NOTE: There will be no Weekly Pool and Network Statistics this week, as I'm going to having a communications-free week. Instead, I've written a short post commemorating one of the strangest and most fun pools of the last couple of years.

Other "in memoriam" posts

0. Introduction
Recently, fireduck (the pool operator of the HHTT bitcoin pool), announced that he would be closing the pool on New Year's Day. This made me a little sad, since it was a great pool which had some innovative fee mechanisms, and was one of the first pools to take variable share submission difficulty seriously. The open source stratum server he developed has been used by at least one other pool (just grep "SOCK" in the coinbase and you'll see which one) and saw very little downtime.

From my (non-mining) point of view, however, the best thing about HHTT was the sporadic and weird coinbase messages. I had been planning a post about my favourite bitcoin blockchain coinbase messages, but as a remembrance of all things HHTT I decided just to focus on theirs.

The chart below shows HHTT's percentage of weekly network blocks solved, and if you click on the image you can read the coinbase messages that were added at each point in time. If you haven't got a magnifying glass handy (since Blogger seems to compress the chart somewhat) then HHTT's unicode coinbase messages, along with the block height of the block with which they were included, are here: http://bitbin.it/VOXWstm9. I will leave it up to the reader to translate the Japanese keyboard emoticons (such as ╯°□°）╯︵ ┻┠┠) . It should also be noted that the block 229417 message appears to be not a penis, but an ASCII sword. Finally, "Finders keepers" had half a coin in it and was found not long after the message appeared. More like that, I say!

So long and thanks for all the weirdness, fireduck. I had lots of fun wondering what weird message you'd come up with, and was more than a bit disappointed that I hadn't seen any recently. There should be more creativity and fun in the blockchain!

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