New website release occurring tomorrow or Friday

[Steve Sokolowski]

We plan to release a new version of the website tomorrow or Friday, depending on how many bugs occur during testing.

Here's a preview of what you can expect in this release:

• This version will introduce Trusted Mining, a new program unique to Prohashing. Trusted Mining provides an earning benefit to customers who participate in the program. To participate, customers must pass identity verification and a background check, and agree to be responsible for the firmware their miners use. The program is optional and customers who decline will see no changes.
• We will make the initial benefit 5%. After a week, the benefit will be the difference between the luck of non-participants and the luck of participants. Our estimate is that the benefit will average around 17% for SHA-256, 4% for scrypt, and 40% for some of the Equihash variants.
• We greatly simplified the way the system handles E-Mail addresses. Previously, there were multiple E-Mail addresses - for payout address changes, security notifications, and newsletters. We found that only eight out of 7600 customers used a different address for those fields, and several of those eight were due to typos. There are still independent E-Mail addresses for miner notifications; we'll be commissioning a poll to discuss whether those should be simplified as well in the future.
• The old website will be discontinued.

After this release, we'll be focusing on improving the website to provide more visibility into data that we already have available. My immediate goal will be to add information about portfolio targeting, so that customers can better understand how their earnings are being adjusted by the system. We also plan to restore the documentation links to all charts and tables, and to expand the PPLNS statistics.

[PolakCrypto]

Slow but sure slippery slope.

I could see coming back in 2 years from this point and it being mandatory to participate in ID verification and a "background check" to even mine at prohashing.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Slow but sure slippery slope.

I could see coming back in 2 years from this point and it being mandatory to participate in ID verification and a "background check" to even mine at prohashing.

That's not our intention, but I'm also not going to say that it's impossible that would happen.

Think about the reason that we're releasing the feature - it's because customers can earn more by participating in the program. I expect that we will get new customers who are drawn here because of the higher earnings. Other pools may decide to follow by offering a similar program. Eventually, there could be two types of pools out there - and the unverified ones offer poor returns because a much larger proportion of the miners on the unverified pools are low-luck than are today.

The other outcome is that the program could turn out to be less popular, in which case there won't be much difference for non-participants. The participants would still earn more, but since the number of low-luck miners, which remains the same, would not dominate the unverified miners, the difference would not be massive.

The concern isn't really as much about whether we would require verification as whether the entire industry would require verification if we see impressive results.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Today's release was successful. However, there is one minor bug where customers are not able to save a new E-Mail address if an address is already present.

Since this issue does not occur in the development environment, we were not able to catch it before deployment, nor can we reproduce it now. I'll try again tomorrow to investigate this E-Mail address issue.