Status as of Tuesday, June 26, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• Overnight, Chris restarted the mining server to add a new error type for coins that have more than one algorithm. These coins often have a "consecutive blocks limit," where mining more than five or ten blocks of the same algorithm in a row would cause the next block to be rejected. The system has a safeguard where, if a block is rejected for an unknown reason, it stops mining that coin on all algorithms until the next block. The safeguard was incorrect for this particular case. First, the system would mine too many blocks of the same algorithm and orphan one, costing customers money, and second, it would not mine the other algorithms to move the chain forward when that happened. It would also disconnect miners who were mining so as not to waste their hashrate. This issue has now been resolved. These coins will have single algorithms go into error when a specific algorithm cannot be mined anymore, and then all errors will be removed after the following block. This fix should increase profit by 2% as orphan rates adjust over the next month.
• I continue to resolve mining server bugs that have been present since day one. The current issue is that some coins are not receiving the latest blocks from the daemons for an unknown reason. This problem has been present for some time now, and the only way to resolve the issue is to restart the servers. It causes lost profit when profitable coins, like Gamecredits, go into error, and is not reproducible in development. I'll be spending today trying to figure out this problem and will issue a fix as soon as possible if I can find one.
• Chris added more ERC20 tokens last night, so enjoy the new tokens!
• ZCash suddenly is experiencing some sort of problem with decoding the coinbase transactions, so we can't mine the coin. I don't know what caused this problem all of a sudden, as Chris made no changes to the daemon. The coin will be offline until I can figure out what happened.
• Constance and Vance are putting the finishing touches on charity mining, so expect that to be available sometime in July. I may then ask Vance if he's interested in working on the implementation of new algorithms, since I need to continue getting to the bottom of the more and more minor bugs that I'm finding with the mining server.
• Chuck Bates agreed to a new contract to add support for Tether payouts. Expect those to be available in August.

[jeffms2003]

Does the ZCash issue have anything to do with the fact the ZCash team released their "Overwinter" update at a block that was mined last night?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Does the ZCash issue have anything to do with the fact the ZCash team released their "Overwinter" update at a block that was mined last night?

I wasn't aware of what this is, but I read more about it. I think that the issue is probably caused by this upgrade.

This is a huge pain. It's yet another example of coin developers devoting effort to things that aren't needed. When will these people recognize that the only thing holding cryptocurrency back right now is performance? Other than Bitcoin Cash, the other development teams seem to be completely ignorant that high fees are the reason that people don't use their networks, not a lack of features.

For now, we'll mine other Equihash coins. ZCash was only about 20% of our mining anyway, so the profitability impact will be minimal at our current hashrate. My impression so far is that this upgrade is a massive change and that we may not have the manpower available to get it tested sufficiently until late in July. On their website, they actually state that you should just "write a parser" for the new transaction format, as if someone can just do that in a day and trust tens of thousands of dollars to an untested parser.

[Eyedol-X]

Does the ZCash issue have anything to do with the fact the ZCash team released their "Overwinter" update at a block that was mined last night?

I wasn't aware of what this is, but I read more about it. I think that the issue is probably caused by this upgrade.

This is a huge pain. It's yet another example of coin developers devoting effort to things that aren't needed. When will these people recognize that the only thing holding cryptocurrency back right now is performance? Other than Bitcoin Cash, the other development teams seem to be completely ignorant that high fees are the reason that people don't use their networks, not a lack of features.

For now, we'll mine other Equihash coins. ZCash was only about 20% of our mining anyway, so the profitability impact will be minimal at our current hashrate. My impression so far is that this upgrade is a massive change and that we may not have the manpower available to get it tested sufficiently until late in July. On their website, they actually state that you should just "write a parser" for the new transaction format, as if someone can just do that in a day and trust tens of thousands of dollars to an untested parser.

As more equihash coins fork to invalidate the Z9, I suspect this issue is going to become more of an issue for equihash as a whole, I expect there will be several "versions" of the algo eventually.

Whatever happened last night during the restart threw all my equihash Nvidia miners using EWBF into an error state where they weren't connected to prohashing somehow but still were "connected" and they were constantly mining rejected shares for hours. Not the first time this has happened but I'm starting to understand what is happening. On my Prohashing status page, all my miners running EWBF were disconnected but when I went and checked each one, they were "connected" to prohashing and mining rejected shares.

[jeffms2003]

Yeah, my z9 was connected and valid so it didn't push to my backup pool so it was just a fancy fan for a while.

[djliss]

Does the ZCash issue have anything to do with the fact the ZCash team released their "Overwinter" update at a block that was mined last night?

I wasn't aware of what this is, but I read more about it. I think that the issue is probably caused by this upgrade.

This is a huge pain. It's yet another example of coin developers devoting effort to things that aren't needed. When will these people recognize that the only thing holding cryptocurrency back right now is performance? Other than Bitcoin Cash, the other development teams seem to be completely ignorant that high fees are the reason that people don't use their networks, not a lack of features.

For now, we'll mine other Equihash coins. ZCash was only about 20% of our mining anyway, so the profitability impact will be minimal at our current hashrate. My impression so far is that this upgrade is a massive change and that we may not have the manpower available to get it tested sufficiently until late in July. On their website, they actually state that you should just "write a parser" for the new transaction format, as if someone can just do that in a day and trust tens of thousands of dollars to an untested parser.

As more equihash coins fork to invalidate the Z9, I suspect this issue is going to become more of an issue for equihash as a whole, I expect there will be several "versions" of the algo eventually.

Whatever happened last night during the restart threw all my equihash Nvidia miners using EWBF into an error state where they weren't connected to prohashing somehow but still were "connected" and they were constantly mining rejected shares for hours. Not the first time this has happened but I'm starting to understand what is happening. On my Prohashing status page, all my miners running EWBF were disconnected but when I went and checked each one, they were "connected" to prohashing and mining rejected shares.

Same here, i lost about an hour before i noticed

[Steve Sokolowski]

I don't understand what the big deal is about ASICs being introduced to coins.

When there are no ASICs, you end up with anyone being able to rent a huge number of Amazon web services instances and takeover a coin with GPUs. ASICs provide two benefits. First, they make it very difficult for someone to obtain a lot of them to destroy a network. Second, they make the people who buy them have an investment in the network's success. GPU miners don't care about any particular coin; they just move their hardware to a different network, or they sell it to gamers.

[cc4506]

I mine with both GPU and ASIC and I see both sides. I just mine zcash with my gpu so I am dedicated to it, (but beginning to rethink that). If the core issues were fixed none of this would matter. But with wallets taking forever to sync if at all - Monero/Ethereum, wild fluctuations that devalue the coin before it can be spent, and of course the fact its difficult to spend. Regardless what the so called experts say if that is not fixed eventually then this will always be something of a side show, pure speculation and nothing more.

[jeffms2003]

They didn't change the algorithm or do any type of fork with this update I don't think. As far as I know ZCash hasn't taken a formal stance on changing the algorithm to be ASIC "resistant". It's a huge waste of time and money to maintain ASIC resistance anyways because companies that make the ASICS can adapt quickly and mine regardless.

[jeffms2003]

I think you can find all the technical info you need about the update here: https://blog.z.cash/overwinter-activated-successfully/