Downtime on Saturday, March 14

[Steve Sokolowski]

On Saturday, March 14, there will be a maintenance period during which we will perform the following:

• Release new code that allows trading in litecoin-denominated markets, which will increase profitability
• Add a feature that allows for better prices to be selected from the existing markets, which will increase profitability
• Upgrade PostgreSQL to version 9.4 to prevent us from having to do the upgrade later when the pool gets huge (and the database gets big)
• Reallocate virtual machine resources so that Chris can add 30 more mining coins, which will increase profitability
• Enable trading using the Bleutrade and AllCoin exchanges, which will increase profitability

The longest of these tasks is the Postgres upgrade, which requires the entire database to be reloaded. It will also probably take 15 minutes to restart the daemon server after reallocating more CPUs to it, because daemons validate their blockchains after starting, and we haven't restarted that server for six months. The goal of this maintenance window is to get these last big upgrades in now so that it is unlikely we will have to perform long downtime periods when there are many more customers to be inconvenienced.

Please set a backup pool before Saturday so that you can continue to make money during this brief outage.

[rootdude]

Right on Steve -

What do you speculate the payouts to increase by percentage-wise? Certainly you have modeled this and have some idea, right? My rigs should be back up and running soon - was hoping there'd be something to look forward to in the interim.

Peace,
rootdude

[Chris Sokolowski]

Hi Rootdude,

I've been testing the release, and honestly, I can't give you a good estimate on how much profitability will increase. The exact effects of this update are difficult to model since our development server and development server's internet connection just are not strong enough to run more than about 30 daemons (compared to over 150 on this server). Adding more markets for existing coins increases the prices obtained by a few percent, but the much larger impact I believe will be in the additional coins.

Having more coins and allows us to take advantage of the numerous coin pumping groups working in the market. For example, if this release had occurred last week, we would have made a killing in the Florincoin market, since its price was pumped up by a factor of 5 at Cryptsy over the past week. We weren't able to take advantage of Florincoin because it was only traded in LTC until Poloniex and Bittrex added it yesterday. I think that these markets that are traded only in LTC will have a large impact on profitability but only intermittently since their volume is generally very low and we will burn through their order books quickly.

We will monitor the effects of the update after it is released and make tweaks to improve profitability further. We have some ideas in mind of new features that can optimize our existing algorithm; it's just a matter of having the time to program and test them.

[rootdude]

Dig what you're saying. Pretty good intra-exchange arb that can be done as well with coins that trade against LTC rather than BTC. You can easily and quickly judge a coins value against the LTC trading pair and make another 1-2.5% just trading against LTC and then using the LTC to BTC trading pair int he same exchange. Those prices don't keep up with one another typically. I used to do this by hand before the bots took over most of the exchanges and was making good money. Anyway, I'm looking forward to bringing the farm back this weekend to see how it all plays out.

[Steve Sokolowski]

This release has been completed successfully. However, because Chris got up so early today, he's going to go to sleep before adding the new coins. We should see the effects of the new features ramp up over the rest of the weekend as Chris adds more coins and enables more markets.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I finished adding the Cryptsy Litecoin-traded coins and markets this morning. I will proceed onto the new AllCoin markets in a few hours after I get some rest.

[rootdude]

I finished adding the Cryptsy Litecoin-traded coins and markets this morning. I will proceed onto the new AllCoin markets in a few hours after I get some rest.

Should be a very interesting next few days Chris - looking forward to seeing how we come out with the new coins and exchanges! Thanks for the hard work!

[Steve Sokolowski]

I also discovered a bug this morning that has a significant impact on orphan block rates. It turns out that the pool was not switching coins immediately upon block submit, but instead workers would continue mining the old block for up to 0.25s afterwards. That would often lead to duplicate work being wasted and would decrease profitability because of high orphan rates.

Chris is working on the testing now and this adjustment should increase profitability more.

[rootdude]

I also discovered a bug this morning that has a significant impact on orphan block rates. It turns out that the pool was not switching coins immediately upon block submit, but instead workers would continue mining the old block for up to 0.25s afterwards. That would often lead to duplicate work being wasted and would decrease profitability because of high orphan rates.

Chris is working on the testing now and this adjustment should increase profitability more.

Glad you guys are on this. I see so many of the coins I'm submitting solutions for go to waste