Status as of Thursday, September 11

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's the development status as of September 11:

• We have several UI changes that have not been released yet but are waiting for one final change. The "coins mined per day" table currently requires around 300kB of bandwidth each time it loads, and I'm working on reducing the CPU load to generate the graph. The bandwidth used will be reduced to 2kB, a 150x decrease. These changes will be pushed on Saturday.
• We cannot launch until we get a scrypt ASIC. This is the number one priority and we still are no further along than we were last week. At this point, it looks like the second seller is also a scammer. I am considering telling Chris the next time to buy twice as many ASICs as we need, even if it costs $4k, and then that way at least one of the vendors will deliver. The other ASICs we can sell to Kristof if he wants them, or if not, take a loss.
• Chris set up the development server to randomly drop packets, have huge latency, and otherwise have a bad network connection so that we can test once these ASICs arrive.
• This weekend, the goal will continue to be increasing profitability. First, I want to work on the "hashMerkleRoot mismatch" issue that has made some coins lose all blocks. Then, I plan to add a method to ignore Coinwarz fork detection for some coins, because Coinwarz is providing bad data for those coins and they are being disabled as forked. If time permits, I will then begin refactoring the codebase to be able to add Poloniex two weekends from now.
• On Monday, our profits were 26%, which occurred because the pool was adjusting miner profits downward to account for lost blocks (which were no longer occurring). The adjustment period for lost blocks is 17.5 days. As time passes, we get more time with the good code and many of the lost blocks from two weeks ago fall off into the past, so the lost block penalty continually adjusts downward. This will cause profitability to continue to increase about 1% per day in comparison to competitors for the next 14 days regardless of other market conditions, which will make our pool even more profitable than it already is.

In short, it all comes down to getting the ASICs. What know that the algorithm in use now is mathematically optimal, but we don't know whether network conditions and the operation of specific types of hardware causes too much hashrate to be lost in frequent restarts. I'm almost certain that losses due to work restarts are much less than mining less profitable coins, but we won't know that until we can review the debug output from an ASIC.

[cryptorific]

You may turn out to be rather lucky with the crappy sellers, knc will be shipping their miner start next week (http://forum.kncminer.com/forum/news-an ... itan-ships). I would suspect this will cause prices on asics to start dropping rather quickly. 3w/MH is kinda ridiculous and beats the a2 by a factor of 3x. Also of note, knc says that the titan can do scrypt-n, I don't know how usable that feature is though and it could turn out to be like gridseed's dual mining capability, cool on paper, useless in practice.