Congratulations to superminer dmdllc2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

I wanted to add a post here to respond to some customers on Twitter who suggested that this transaction fee was a mistake and that we return it to whoever paid it.

First, we haven't received a request for repayment, so there isn't evidence that the fee was a mistake. Nobody has contacted us about the issue, so there's nothing to do anyway.

If we were a pay-per-last-n-shares pool that paid in the coin that was mined, it would be relatively simple to refund the fee. But we are a pay-per-share pool, and since people rented hashrate from NiceHash based upon our API data, they would incur huge losses since they wouldn't have started the rentals had the pool not reported that so much profit was available.

The debts to miners were incurred before the block was mined. You can see that even though the block was worth just $100,000, we actually paid $120,000 more yesterday to customers, so we lost money on this block because we were less lucky than average.

A second issue is that the Verge mined in the transaction fee was sold immediately after it was mined, in the middle of the night before we even noticed that anything had happened. The price of Verge rose significantly since when the block was found (the block was sold at a low after a huge crash.) Even if we bought back the Verge, we could still only return 70% of it because the price of Verge increased so much.

Finally, there would then be the money transmission issue associated with such a refund. We would be executing a direct request by someone to exchange money for Verge and transmit it to that person, which would require a money transmission license. This is the reason why we don't honor requests to change payout coins after they are earned.

Therefore, even if someone contacted us, there unfortunately isn't much we could do. We incurred a legal liability to our customers to pay them debts per the formula in our documentation, and also could only execute a refund of the fee if we took a risk on money transmission regulations. If the sender did make a mistake, then I feel heartbroken for him or her, but we would be breaking the hearts of 5900 other people to help one person.

[EyePeaSea]

It just sucks that I didn't participate because my miners were assigned a higher difficulty coin at that exact moment.

Ah, I think that's what happened to me as well - my daily value was actually lower. But I guess that's just the luck of the draw - like so many things, you need to be in the right place at the right time...

I am wondering about whether I should change my difficulty though. My understanding is that lower difficulty will submit shares more frequently, but if I have high latency to Prohashing (167.88.15.87?) then I'll end up with more stale blocks. So, my question is - what is high latency? 50ms? 150ms? 250ms? And is PING/ICMP good enough to judge the latency?