Data Center in the Sky 1.4.0

The Data Center mod moves from 1.6.10 to 1.7.0. The mod list is otherwise unchanged. An existing world updates in place - nothing has to be rebuilt, and no balance is lost.

Five new coins, and six years that are no longer empty

Between Ethereum in July 2015 and Chia in May 2021 the calendar offered nothing new at all - about sixty hours of a server's life without a single arrival, across exactly the years most people remember. That gap is now filled:

• Ethereum Classic (20 July 2016) - the chain Ethereum forked away from, running the same Ethash on the same hardware. It does not halve: every five million blocks the reward drops by a fifth.
• Zcash (28 October 2016) - its own algorithm, Equihash, and its own hardware decision. Its reward ramped up from zero over the first 20,000 blocks, so a miner standing there on day one is not paid a fortune at the launch price of $5,941.
• Bitcoin Cash (1 August 2017) - Bitcoin's rules on Bitcoin's hardware. A SHA-256 machine can now be pointed at either chain, which is exactly what a real one can do.
• Ravencoin (3 January 2018) - Bitcoin's schedule denominated a thousand times over, and a chain that changed its own proof-of-work in 2020 to shake off the ASICs built for it.
• Ergo (1 July 2019) - a reward that walks down to zero instead of halving.

Every one of them carries real daily history: price, traded volume and network size, measured day by day from its own first block. Their emission curves were checked by adding them up - totalled to today, each lands on its chain's real supply.

Point a machine at a coin, not at an algorithm

That distinction did not exist while every algorithm had one coin behind it. Two of them no longer do, so the dropdown lists chains with the work beside each. A machine saved before this keeps mining exactly what it was mining.

The end of Ethereum mining is announced in advance

The Merge was always modelled - reward and network both go to zero on 15 September 2022 - but it was announced on the day, so an Ethash rig went from earning to earning nothing overnight with no warning. Five real milestones now lead up to it, from the Beacon Chain going live in December 2020 to the nine-day warning in September 2022. From the last rehearsal on, the messages say plainly what a miner should do about it - including that Ethereum Classic runs the same algorithm.

And afterwards nobody is left guessing: Ethash disappears from the list, and a machine still pointed at a dead chain says so instead of quietly burning power.

A market can be too small for your order

Selling used to be filled at the day's closing price however large the order was. On 17 July 2010, the first day a Bitcoin market existed at all, the entire world traded twenty coins - about one dollar's worth. An order is now measured against that day's real traded volume: a hundredth of it costs about 1%, a whole day's trading halves what you get.

The world's price never moves. Only what your own order is filled at, while it is filled. Ten thousand Bitcoin sold in August 2010 keep 23% of the price; the same ten thousand at the 2021 peak keep 98%, because by then the market could swallow them. Early fortunes now have to be sold down over time rather than dumped.

The technician actually works

Reported from play, and worse than it looked:

• He walked in circles. Two separate faults, both fixed. A room already at maximum cooling had him wanting a fan one step higher than the fan can go, for ever; and a repair he could not afford or could not source reported success anyway, so nothing was remembered and he walked back to the same machine until somebody noticed.
• He could not reach a rack mounted above the floor. He now stands on the floor and reaches up two blocks, as you do without jumping - a three-block wall is serviceable from the ground.
• He can fix machines whose parts are long out of production. The shelf first, then the same part new, then the cheapest new equivalent, then the same part second-hand, then a second-hand equivalent - and finally anything that fits at all, even if it is weaker, because a machine standing still earns nothing. He says which of those it was.
• A dead mainboard is no longer the end of a machine. He will rebuild it onto a current board, but only if he can finish: the whole swap is worked out first, and if any displaced part cannot be replaced, nothing is touched.

Also

• Mining a coin whose chain has stopped, or whose supply is exhausted, tells you so instead of silently paying nothing.
• /balance lists every coin you hold. It had been naming three by hand and missing four of them since Litecoin was added.

The full list is in the mod's changelog on its CurseForge page.