Status as of Thursday, July 15, 2021

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good afternoon! Now that we are hiring more people, we'll have manpower available to do more publicity-oriented stuff, like writing these posts like we did before 2020.

• I'm pleased to announce that we have hired a new web developer, Michael Steward, who will start on August 10. When he starts, he will visit here and introduce himself. Michael previously performed contracting work in 2017 for Prohashing. He was given a PlayStation 4 in exchange for the two-factor authentication system, and his code survives to this day.
• Vance has stopped working on the website, which will only see critical bugfixes between July 15 and August 10. He will focus on Chia mining, which we hope to have done within this next month.
• Once the manpower situation has stabilized, the focus will shift to the mining servers, which have a lot of issues that can be fixed to improve stability and reliability. While the memory leak on the servers has not yet been fixed, the hardware now has enough memory that the mining servers haven't been restarted in six days.
• We resolved a major issue that affected several coins, including Peercoin, where the "validateaddress" RPC call had the "pubkey" attribute removed in a recent update that was pulled from the Bitcoin Core github repository. "getaddressinfo" needs to be used instead. Additionally, we optimized code by not creating useless live updates that are just discarded when nobody is viewing them on the website. Both changes will improve profitability - the first by mining more coins, and the second by reducing latency in sending out new work to customers. The changes will require restarts of the mining servers, which will take about 30 seconds of downtime today.
• Steven is focusing his attention on ACH payments to bank accounts in the legacy system. Right now, we are investigating Dwolla, so that a payout proportion could be sent directly to a bank account, which is better than PayPal because there is no intermediary and lower fees. If we can use Dwolla or Wells Fargo's API, we can likely set the free payout threshold for ACH as low as $50. Wire transfers would be more expensive because we believe they are processed by humans at the banks, but may still be possible.

[Murr808]

Steve for the Chia pool will it require the official pool protocol plots or will the OG plots be able to use in pooling, like HPool does ?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Steve for the Chia pool will it require the official pool protocol plots or will the OG plots be able to use in pooling, like HPool does ?

Chia mining is so complex that this investigation is still in the early stages, but Vance can answer this question when he has more information.

[vancevu]

We're planning on using the official pool protocol so replotting to portable plots will be required.

[Murr808]

Thanks for the update. Btw last night I hit another block solo farming on OG plots, that's two months in a row getting rewards for me. So I think I'll stick to solo farming a little while longer.

We're planning on using the official pool protocol so replotting to portable plots will be required.