PPLNS error correction

[Steve Sokolowski]

There is a PPLNS mining error that was resolved a few weeks ago, but which continues to affect some customers.

The original cause of the problem is that we incorrectly believed that PostgreSQL treats NULL values as unique, when a unique constraint is used on a table. That led to many rows being inserted for coins where a PPLNS block had never been found. Chris resolved this issue in mid-December and released the changes. At that point, as we just discovered, new customers and customers who were mining coins where at least one block had previously been found were credited correctly.

However, Chris also discovered this week that a small number of customers who at the time were mining a coin that had never had any blocks previously found, but since which a PPLNS block was found, were still being assigned shares to the first round that had already been paid. As a result, these customers' shares would never be paid.

Chris is working on a two-step approach to address this issue. First, he will backup and erase the first round work for all customers affected by the issue. Then, he will try to determine how, if it is possible at all, to credit the affected miners for the time they were credited for the first round after the round had already completed.

Unfortunately, we don't know if there is sufficient data to determine the correct payout amounts for these customers, and this is by far one of the most complex issues Chris has ever investigated. We do know that no money was actually lost, as the customers were mining the correct blocks. Chris is going to retrieve very old backups to see if they have better information available, which may take a week.

We apologize for the delays in resolving this issue. No customers are currently being affected by any PPLNS mining issues, and all future earnings are correct. The only problem is in determining how much money was incorrectly applied to a finished round for this subset of customers.

[lombana]

New to this but have been wondering, just how long should a round last? I've been showing First Round* since yesterday morning, my proportion continues to climb and my reward value does as well but aside from one payout of a Florcoin I'm not seeing anything that tells me I'm making an impact and what to expect or when to expect it.

I'm mining BTC and the 1st share is showing 1d 01:33:56 as of this writing but I guess being new I'm not sure exactly what to expect.

Thanks in advance,
ML

[chasran01]

Greetings!

Is this still happening? My miners lost connectivity under PPLNS for DGB, and when they came back, the 5 pools they had > 40% contribution in, and almost 1k in DGB share should the blocks be found), seemed to reset and now instead of showing total block rewards of 531, are showing block rewards in the hundreds of thousands. The proportion has been 0'd out on all pools. The internet connection where the miners are housed were up the entire time, but they got 100% packet loss to the pool. As of now, the Proportion is a mere 13% after hours of this disconnect (when previously the rates were in the 30's and 40's due to my hash rate). I've opened a ticket, but something does not seem right...

Is this what was going on last month? Thanks in advance!

[Steve Sokolowski]

Greetings!

Is this still happening? My miners lost connectivity under PPLNS for DGB, and when they came back, the 5 pools they had > 40% contribution in, and almost 1k in DGB share should the blocks be found), seemed to reset and now instead of showing total block rewards of 531, are showing block rewards in the hundreds of thousands. The proportion has been 0'd out on all pools. The internet connection where the miners are housed were up the entire time, but they got 100% packet loss to the pool. As of now, the Proportion is a mere 13% after hours of this disconnect (when previously the rates were in the 30's and 40's due to my hash rate). I've opened a ticket, but something does not seem right...

Is this what was going on last month? Thanks in advance!

Chris discovered some PPLNS accumulated difficulty issues involving ethash coins yesterday and resolved them. The resolution fixed all coins. Feel free to respond if you still feel that there are issues involving other coins.

[bonedout]

still happening my Your Proportion went from 15% to under 7 slowly going down by its self then my balance for blocks found was even going down on digibytes and last week my etc after doing pplns for about 1 week was at over 25% and went straight back to 0 with no reward somthing not right ive lost money from my rentals

[Steve Sokolowski]

still happening my Your Proportion went from 15% to under 7 slowly going down by its self then my balance for blocks found was even going down on digibytes and last week my etc after doing pplns for about 1 week was at over 25% and went straight back to 0 with no reward somthing not right ive lost money from my rentals

As we indicate in the documentation, Prohashing doesn't provide support for cloud mining rentals. Many cloud mining services have issues like "negative deltas" and others make no guarantee that you're getting what you're paying for. Cloud mining services are not prohibited, but we don't provide active customer service for them.

If you are direct mining, we'll be glad to help you. As I said earlier, I think that these issues would be best handled through the ticketing system, so let's continue the conversation there.