Status as of Wednesday, September 19, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• As a result of last week's poll, our effort over the next few weeks continues to be focused on improving reliability. The monitoring system now checks 244 interfaces for issues and we have identified some services that seem to connect and disconnect at random times for unknown reasons. I'm now working on higher-level queries that understand more than just things like free disk space, to detect issues like failed payouts.
• Chris finally came up with a theory that a failing disk was the cause of the ETH synchronization issues. We discovered that Vertcoin and Feathercoin were also located on this disk, and those two coins were going into error frequently and disconnecting miners. Chris moved the data to a different disk and he is monitoring the system. Right now, there have been no further outages on that server in eight hours, and the system clock has remained synchronized during that time.
• Constance just released the ability to see actual and target payout proportions in the "live balances" boxes. The "target proportion" is what the miner requested to earn, and the "actual proportion" is what the miner actually is earning, given the status of coins that are in error. This new feature should help customers understand why certain coins are being earned. A new chart will follow soon, and this new chart will provide the user with a view of data that already exists comparing how much they earned in a coin for a given day compared to how much they intended to earn.
• We added support for several new Ethash coins that are highly profitable and restarted the mining server. However, those coins are not mineable because there is no exchange offering them that accepts US customers, given that HitBTC locked its wallet recently. The big exchange for these coins is Bitfinex. Once HitBTC unlockes its wallets, or if we are able to locate more exchanges that accept US customers, then we'll be able to significantly increase profitability on Ethash.
• The continuing loss of users despite scrypt profitability increasing, and the lack of growth in SHA-256 despite bitcoin difficulty increasing, is something that we want to better understand. This is confusing to me because I believe that the system is more stable and reliable than it has ever been, and yet there were more customers when we could barely keep up. If you decided to leave the pool recently, please reply or submit a support ticket explaining why so that we can get a better understanding of the issues that caused the decision.

[CSZiggy]

My main focus is profitability. If another pool offers me a higher daily payout, i'm switching to that pool.

Would love to be able to see how many coins X amount of hash on an algo would earn me of that algo's base coin....how many BTC for 1TH of sha-256, how much equihash for 1/sol per day, how many LTC for 100 MH per day...would make some comparisons easier.

When the profitability of the pool rose, I came back and tested it, and with the rise it was almost a dead heat with litecoinpool.org

But when the last difficulty applied they rose their payouts up to 107% which put them back up in front for daily payouts and was enough percentages to make me go back over once I was done running me 2 day tests on both systems. As long as I can make 10% more someplace else, I won't be here. Pretty readout screens, updated info, addition of new coins....all comes down to how many coins can I get per day with my hashing power here or someplace else. Would love to have been able to vote a few more times, but with the higher profits I haven't been on here to mine to earn votes to cast.

Add to that 2 or 3 times now where all the market coins have crashed 10% or more in a single day. Coins squeek up 2-3% for 2 and 3 days at a time, then take a 10% step backwards erasing any gains they have made. The coin prices are stagnant and in some cases slipping lower. Due to the prices of electricty some people are just shutting down rather than to keep running as the profit margin is smaller or gone now for some folks. My step-brother bought a machine at the start of the year I found out...and just turned it off last month due to it now costing more to run than it was making him.

[greenhorn0815]

Hey Steve,

Is a Skein and Myrgro pool in the works? They are far more profitable then Quark is.

Also, E3s could connect to your pool if you would exclude the # character that the miner includes in the workername string, would be great to see that done

[Steve Sokolowski]

My main focus is profitability. If another pool offers me a higher daily payout, i'm switching to that pool.

Would love to be able to see how many coins X amount of hash on an algo would earn me of that algo's base coin....how many BTC for 1TH of sha-256, how much equihash for 1/sol per day, how many LTC for 100 MH per day...would make some comparisons easier.

When the profitability of the pool rose, I came back and tested it, and with the rise it was almost a dead heat with litecoinpool.org

But when the last difficulty applied they rose their payouts up to 107% which put them back up in front for daily payouts and was enough percentages to make me go back over once I was done running me 2 day tests on both systems. As long as I can make 10% more someplace else, I won't be here. Pretty readout screens, updated info, addition of new coins....all comes down to how many coins can I get per day with my hashing power here or someplace else. Would love to have been able to vote a few more times, but with the higher profits I haven't been on here to mine to earn votes to cast.

Add to that 2 or 3 times now where all the market coins have crashed 10% or more in a single day. Coins squeek up 2-3% for 2 and 3 days at a time, then take a 10% step backwards erasing any gains they have made. The coin prices are stagnant and in some cases slipping lower. Due to the prices of electricty some people are just shutting down rather than to keep running as the profit margin is smaller or gone now for some folks. My step-brother bought a machine at the start of the year I found out...and just turned it off last month due to it now costing more to run than it was making him.

Unfortunately, there's no way that we'll ever be able to pay 107% of LTC while only mining litecoins. It just doesn't make logical sense that they can either. Obviously, if it were possible to earn 7% above expected value mining litecoins, then everyone would be doing it. They have no explanation on their site about where the money comes from. The names of the owners of the pool are not listed, as is the law in most jurisdictions. They also operate servers in the United States but are noncompliant with IRS regulations. It may very well be that customers are willing to take the risk of mining there, and if so, I wish them luck.

But that said, I don't think that litecoinpool is responsible for the whole picture. I also performed a comparison with litecoinpool's hashrate a while back and found that their hashrate declined by much more than ours did over the same period. Therefore, I don't think it's as simple an explanation as that everyone is going to litecoinpool. Plus, the reductions in customer numbers are being seen across the board on all algorithms, not just scrypt.

I most importantly want to find out if there was a change to our software in a recent release that caused a group of miners to become incompatible, and those miners are leaving because of subtle problems that they don't talk on the forums about.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hey Steve,

Is a Skein and Myrgro pool in the works? They are far more profitable then Quark is.

Also, E3s could connect to your pool if you would exclude the # character that the miner includes in the workername string, would be great to see that done

I've been asking people about this but don't have E3s to test. Could you provide an example of what the workername field looks like, so that we can correct this issue?

[greenhorn0815]

I can help you test, the string looks like this

#greenhorn0815.004B29884345

The miner adds a # and a random workername.

Let me know and ill point mine over

[Helotours]

Steve,

You encourage us to open tickets to ask questions. Some days ago - I asked a question and never received a response. Also BTC payouts missed last night?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Steve,

You encourage us to open tickets to ask questions. Some days ago - I asked a question and never received a response. Also BTC payouts missed last night?

I don't recall this ticket. What question did you ask?

[Steve Sokolowski]

I can help you test, the string looks like this

#greenhorn0815.004B29884345

The miner adds a # and a random workername.

Let me know and ill point mine over

OK. In that case, I'll add the ability to remove that symbol and then will send it to Chris for testing.

[greenhorn0815]

[/quote]

OK. In that case, I'll add the ability to remove that symbol and then will send it to Chris for testing.[/quote]

Sounds good, thank you!