Status as of Friday, April 20, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• I haven't been posting much about the "low luck miners" issue, and plan to do so over the coming weeks. For now, I'm pleased to be able to share a conclusion that we have enough confidence in. We determined definitively that NiceHash's system is not responsible for the problem. We were able to do that by renting hashrate from NiceHash and achieving a case when the problem did not occur, therefore proving that their servers themselves are not introducing the issue. There is no general issue with all NiceHash hashrate.
• On the other hand, it is also clear that there are some specific miners being rented at NiceHash, just as there are specific miners that are not rented at NiceHash, that exhibit the problem. One of the problems with NiceHash is that rentals are anonymous, so there is no accountability for sellers in regards to the quality of their mining rigs. Since the luck differential has always been between 3 and 5%, the odds of a rental including a significant number of low luck miners are about 1 in 30.
• For now, what we are going to do is to modify our documentation to more strongly point out that avoiding low luck miners is the responsibility of the renter. Currently, in their consideration of whether to rent or not, renters should account for these odds when computing the expected value of their rentals. We told one customer who clearly rented low luck miners to contact NiceHash and ask them for a refund, on the grounds that (s)he paid for a product and the product was defective and therefore not what (s)he paid for. We're awaiting news on NiceHash's response to his/her support ticket. If they issue a refund, that would be the best circumstance and renters will be safe from fraud. The fraud in this case is being perpetrated against NiceHash, so they have an interest in preventing their customers from falling victim to this scheme.
• Constance has been resolving a number of website bugs, and we expect more fixes today. Just over the past few days, she has fixed the payout address save buttons, "ghost" workers, disappearing error messages, the worker history chart performance, and more.
• HitBTC and Binance are now trading for existing coins. Chris is going to look into what new coins they offer this weekend and add those. Novaexchange is also coming back online, providing us with a large number of new coins. We've been surprised with how all of a sudden there are so many more exchanges than there were two years ago. I've always wondered why there is such a flood of people getting into the exchange business. The licenses are expensive, there is a huge risk of theft, legal issues and criminal activity are easy to get accidentally involved in, and they take just 0.0025 of each trade. The profit margins are almost zero, and yet there are now 30 or 40 exchanges, compared to the five we were able to find last year.
• I also wanted to clarify about the discussion about the bitcoin block that the pool found that's been going on, as I think some customers are confused as to how pay-per-share mining works. We calculate how many hashes are expected to be needed to find a block, then divide the (block reward + transaction fees) by that number of hashes, and then pay that rate per hash. In this case, we made $20,000 in profit because the pool found the block earlier than expected. This amount is not paid to customers because the next block may come later than expected, so we need the money to avoid going into debt. In a pay-per-last-N shares pool, like Slush's pool, you would have earned more than normal due to the good luck, but you also would earn little if the pool was having poor luck - and the other coins we mine here push the profitability to 10% above bitcoin.
• You can now use commas between password arguments, for those people who were having issues with accepting spaces in passwords.

[TheLiZArD]

Hi Steve, thanks for the comma in the password argument, tested and working with my WhatsMiners M3!!

[alim]

Another option for the passwords arguments is to put the string in quotes for Moonlander2s. I can't really get them to mine here so I'm pointing them to another pool.

I'll keep trying when a coin has a low enough difficulty to make it worthwhile.

[Eyedol-X]

Good morning!

• You can now use commas between password arguments, for those people who were having issues with accepting spaces in passwords.

Cool, this may fix an issue I was having with a equihash miner and failover, will have to test it out.