Profitability Since Outage on 11/23/15

[JarBinks]

Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving!

Prior to the outage I suspended my use of the pool and have been waiting for stability before I return.
Granted stability has returned but the profitability I am seeing does not look like it was before.

Previous to the outage Prohashing generally exceeded the BTC profitability of mining LTC directly.
Since coming back it has been below that of LTC.
I have been using the same methodology for the past few months and have not seen this until the outage.

I am using the profitability number at the top of the website, recognizing it is for the previous day.

Hopefully I am doing something incorrect but, I would appreciate some insight.

[Chris Sokolowski]

Thanks for letting me know. I will definitely look into this today; we should not have profitability lower than Litecoin.

There should not have been any change in earnings after the server upgrade since we did not change any of the earnings calculations. However, it's good to have a timeframe to investigate what might be the cause. I know that we recently fixed a bug that caused a small number of users who requested payouts in dozens of coins at once to earn more than they should have, and that decreased the reported average profitability even though the actual earnings of most users did not change at all. Still, average earnings should not be lower than Litecoin.

I will let you know what i find. Thanks for the report.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I'm having trouble finding where our profitability was lower than Litecoin. Where are you obtaining your Litecoin earnings data so that I can compare the pool?

I also found an issue with our pool where the daily earnings reported were two days old. The chart was marked correctly, but the latest date on the chart was not the most recent day. We have fixed the issue.

[JarBinks]

Well I am kinda glad you did not find a large issue, and I saw you changed the value up top.

The image below shows the last 30 days of LTC BTC Profitability, Black, vs. Prohashing BTC Profitability, Blue.
On 12/2 You can notice the change you made in the top ticker and the large change in difficulty for LTC.
In general notice the Blue stays above the Black except starting 11/23 where a majority of the Blue is below the Black.

I am a little embarrassed to say that I am not calculating LTC BTC Profitability as I should, I found a source and when I tested it, it looked good.
I am even more embarrassed to say my source is Nicehash , In the JSON gotten by the following API call has profitability_ltc repeated lots.
https://www.nicehash.com/api?method=sta ... location=0

It is possible my source is incorrect, or the situation will eventually resolve itself.

[Chris Sokolowski]

I computed the data from our database and created the following chart:



The November 24 pool data is missing due to our server maintenance.

The cause of the lower profitability was that on November 27 we got extremely unlucky and had two orphaned Litecoin blocks, which increased the orphan rate of Litecoin, decreasing the pool profitability. As we have mined more Litecoin blocks since then, the orphan penalty decreased, and the pool profitability has risen relative to Litecoin.

Since we are a pay-per-share pool, If we didn't have the orphan penalty, the pool would be insolvent due to orphans. Unfortunately, on Litecoins, the orphan rate can have a significant effect on profitability. However, consider the alternative case. If we were a pay-per-last-N-shares pool, November 27 would have an extremely low profitability, and the rest of the days would have higher profitability. Over a long time period, the earnings will be the same between how we calculate earnings and how a PPLNS pool calculates earnings, and in our pool, users can count on a consistent payout each day.

I hope this explanation helps. On another note, I'll have to ask Steve if it is possible to add this Litecoin data to the charts page. I originally thought it would be impossible to calculate Litecoin profitability without overloading our database, but it isn't as complicated a query as I thought.

[JarBinks]

Excellent explanation, I always enjoy learning how you guys do what you do.

The 27th makes sense to me because it was so low I actually removed that data point because I thought it was in error.
I will not do that in the future now that I understand how the pool works.

The image is not visible to me.