Status as of Thursday, March 1, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• We'll be issuing the new equihash release today, at around 10:00am. As mentioned before, there will be a few minutes of downtime to get the release out. In addition to adding equihash mining, this release also fixes a number of bugs and issues.
• Chris reported that there were network connectivity issues earlier. Of course, they happened while I was asleep, as they always seem to. The issue seems to be that Javapipe's servers are disconnecting from our own every 30 seconds or so, and OpenVPN loses its connection. Chris submitted a support ticket to Javapipe, but has not heard back from them yet.
• We were disappointed yesterday in the fiber installation. Rather than connecting the cable to the box on the other side of the street, they simply ran the cable from the racks through the walls and conduits to the outside of the building, and then left a huge loop there for the next person to run under the street. Chris assumes that means that there are still two steps left. Someone now has to complete this task of connecting the cable, and then there will still be another person coming later to turn the service on.
• To get new coins added more quickly, I've decided to spend even more money and start putting up short tasks to create derived classes implementing the coins' APIs. This will supplement the new employee who will be starting on April 9. I hope to post a call for developers to implement Ripple later today.
• I made some improvements to make the system more aggressive in its pricing at exchanges, which will increase profitability about 2% compared to what it would have been had that not been done. We'll be focusing more on this area of profitability since many customers have answered the polls asking for focus on it. As listed on the documentation, we don't plan on lowering fees because lowering fees is not the most effective way of earning people more money. As you can see, we were able to get 2% here just with a few days of work, and spending money looking into other improvements will yield far more than any fee reductions could. Feel free to let us know what you think of today's profits.
• There is a new poll aiming to obtain more data about the profitability issue. In this poll, we're trying to determine how serious the issue is; in the next, we'll be looking for a survey of the types of mining equipment miners are using. This poll tries to determine which type of pool is providing customers with more profit (if any), and whether their opinions on the matter are backed by real-world recent testing, or whether they are using outdated data from before February 10.
• During the network connectivity issues this morning, some shares weren't recorded because the database stopped responding. I wasn't able to determine the cause of the issue, but I restarted the database and everything is working fine now. No money was lost, and Chris will make share corrections after today's release.

[kj888k]

as i mentioned before i use prohashing as my backup pool.but i also set it as my primary every now and then to check if it has improved.i like prohahsing. honest operators who try their best to compensate miners when issues arise from unfortunate events are very scarce. but profitability in PH is not that good. even with the 2% rise in profits it is usually way lower than some pools. one thing i used to like about PH is thr low reject rate.but my recent test showed me reject rate has increased more than 10 folds for me which is quite surprising since my network has been upgraded 10 folds the speed and lower latency. so whatever gains i got from that optimization was way less than what i lost from connectivity.

although i will do another test later since i read there is a problem with your recent connection. hopefully profitability and reliability issues are improved so i can rest easy and leave my miners in your care permanently. and yes i do not mind the current fees you charge. does really matter if we make more when we mine with u.i only mind because we do not make more when we mine with you. sometimes i can actually get 2x for a miner woth some effort.

[spauk]

i agree with the rejects, that would be a good thing to reduce to improve profitability. it wasn't always this bad but in the past few months it seems like anywhere between 5-10% rejects is pretty average, and they usually happen in pairs and show up on miner efficiency in groups of 10 (usually shows 20 rejected shares exactly) but the rejects don't show very long, so efficiency says 100% even though i know there are rejects. which doesn't help at all when trying to figure out what's really going on, but i'm pretty sure it's some problem on prohashing's side.