Adjusting profitability for algorithms

[Steve Sokolowski]

As I posted yesterday, we discovered two issues with the system. For an unknown reason, a lot of miners are mining stale blocks, and for a reason that we fixed on Sunday, miners were being partially paid for stale blocks. About 6-9% of miners are losing revenue due to this problem, which implies that we can increase profitability by 6-9% or more once it is resolved.

Now that the payment for stale blocks has stopped, payouts went down by a significant amount. The effect was that the people who are submitting the blocks are now penalized, rather than everyone as a whole. The extra money saved from paying out the stale block submissions can now be redistributed to customers, but we don't know exactly how much that is yet, because the problem is not equally present across all algorithms.

Chris is making adjustments to profitability every day to reach our target of 5%. Yesterday, he discovered that x11 profits were down due to the fix and he increased them by 8% beginning at midnight. He will continue to make adjustments over the next few nights until reach the target again.

At the same time, we're continuing to investigate the core problem of why miners aren't being assigned fresh work in some cases. Since this is our top priority, we apologize in advance for delayed responses to support tickets about topics other than this issue. I plan to work 16 hours per day until this issue is resolved, given how immense the impact will be once a solution is found.

[x24646h3]

You guys are simply awesome. Thanks for staying on top of all of this complex problems!

Darren Mitchell