Why I am leaving ProHashing (at least for now)

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi TechElucidation,

I would be glad if you would like to test ethash profitability. Please post your results if you do; I'm pretty confident that the difference is not 20% anymore.

In regards to stability, we are indeed aware that there seems to be some hardware that does not respond quickly to work restarts. Usually, that doesn't crash the miner, but it does lead to lower hashrate when the workers have to restart on a new job. In fact, that's why we added the new warning a few weeks ago that indicates that the worker is encountering a lower hashrate than usual, and might be able to improve by mining a static coin.

In regards to the CEOs, that's one part I don't agree with you about. If I worked for a newspaper and were writing a story about wallet security, I would want to talk to the person who actually secured wallets, rather than the CEO of an exchange who is talking about the way someone else secured wallets. It's not clear how to get the journalist to ask that question.


Website

In regards to the website, you may not be aware that the current website is actually the third design that we have used. The current design was created by Digital Silk, an ad agency who we first started working with about a year ago, and Michael worked to implement their design until it was released on May 9.

One of the points we noticed is that every person seems to have a different view of which website design is best. I fully expected that there would be people who don't like the colors (and there certainly are enough of those) or the position of buttons, but every design has also received strong criticism about navigation, search engine optimization, order of text, and other things similar to what you've been discussing. I hope, therefore, you can understand that my position about the website has to be that we paid Digital Silk $30,000 to design it, and that we will now live or die based upon the results.

They had different opinions about what should be featured on the pages and in what order than you do. I'm not saying that your comments about advertising features in specific places are wrong; I agree with a lot of them. However, at this point, I think we need to devote our web developers' time to adding new features and fixing bugs, rather than another major revamp of the website that, most likely, will make you happy but which will result in comments by someone else recommending changes to where we should advertise each feature.

I know that you will disagree, but I hope you can understand my position that I appreciate your advice on the website, but we have changed its layout and design too many times and there is little evidence that additional changes will provide more value than would adding features customers request.

In regards to the exact wording in specific sections, which is easy to change for a large gain, I'm going to add a ticket referencing your post, and Michael will definitely look into making some of the text changes, like the "24/7 support" change and how miners are referenced.


Action items

Rather than addressing every single point, I want to try to get a list of items together that we should work on. I'd appreciate it if you reviewed this summary of items that I believe you have asked for, so that I can make corrections if I misunderstood. Note that these are the items I believe that we can do right now, and some tasks (like how you mentioned miningpoolstats.stream, whose owner won't allow us to advertise with him because he refuses to provide 1099-MISC data), are not included because they are unworkable.

Fees
Goal: Do everything possible to minimize a fee increase later this year (due to war-driven energy costs and massive inflation) by continuing aggressive cost-cutting.

• Continue selling unnecessary hardware.
• Cease server upgrades for at least one year.
• Upgrade to Debian 11 on hypervisors to cut electricity costs.
• Switch from paid tools, such as JIRA, to open-source software.
• Cancel the idea of ever holding an in-person meeting, even if the virus improves.
• Reduce tax penalties and fines by better estimation of the length of time it takes to move money to the legacy financial system.
• Cease talking to lawyers unless we are actually sued.

Website
Goal: Improve the user experience.

• Change text of some sections to better describe the pool's features so that excitement is built around them. Work with TechElucidation to identify which text to change.

Mining servers
Goal: Increase reliability without amplifying fee increases due to inflation.

• Automatically determine which miners can handle Proswitching and which cannot.
• Complete implementation of the "backup coin daemons" so that downtime due to third-party software is eliminated.
• Investigate latency, but am not clear whether TechElucidation is suggesting expanding beyond self-hosted servers to do that or whether there is a communication problem about how latency is less important.
• Add SSL mining, if CPU usage is low enough to be done without raising fees. SSL mining will not actually secure money, but may cause some people to think the system is more secure.
• Work on optimizations for RandomX, Chia, and Equihash to address reduced found blocks on those algorithms.

Monitoring and auditing
Goal: Detect more classes of problems earlier, and prioritize which classes of problems we should detect (since there are so many potential problems we simply can't deal with all of them in a timely fashion.)

• Add more monitoring tasks to Grafana and make sure these alerts are being sent to Alexa to wake Chris up in the middle of the night.
• Figure out how to prioritize which features should be closely monitored and which should not be closely monitored, because it is not possible to notice immediately when anything breaks, only when the most important stuff is broken.

Customer service
Goal: Ramp up the level of service.

• Reply to tickets in a more timely fashion, particularly on weekends and holidays.

Marketing
Goal:

• Issue more press releases and figure out how to get those press releases picked up by newspapers.
• Read and respond to viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8869.

TechElucidation, please respond with changes and additions to this list. This entire conversation has been very helpful, but it will be useless until we finalize this list of action items. I'm sure I missed and misunderstood a lot of what you said in the above.

[TechElucidation]

Hi Steve,

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am dropping the profitability discussion at this point. I stated my observations, and you stated areas you felt were issues with the assessment, and that everything was fine or recently addressed from your side. I have completed my own testing, and will make my own decision, but I won’t continue to try to pursue the topic here.

I think the difference of what a journalist would do and what you would do, is based on the intended outcome. You are assuming what you want is what the journalist would want. Your intention is to learn and share information on crypto wallet security, and get possibly even get details about them. A journalist is interested in writing a story that will get attention. They are hoping their story brings in readers/viewers, builds their (the journalists’ reputation), and have their organization able to sell advertising on those pages and segments.

When I said it makes perfect senses to me that a journalist would talk to the CEO, it is from that perspective. They want a good story, and saying they spoke to the CEO sounds good, and the CEO is trained to provide a clear and interesting story. If they can lead with “I spoke with the CEO of this tech firm” that sounds better than “I spoke with a programmer at this tech firm”. In addition, if they can build a history of talking with CEOs, in then in the future they can use that to talk to other CEOs. Think about famous journalists, they also talk about how they were talking to “leaders” in industry or politics.

You can also see plenty of examples of this across all news organizations. When Pfizer comes out with a new drug, do you get the lab tech on CNN and FOX, or does the CEO come out and talk about all great things Pfizer is doing; promoting the company as a whole, and only touching on the new drug and all the lives Pfizer is going to save without much detail? When was the last time Apple’s or Google’s annual presentation headlined by an regular engineer or developer, rather than the CEO or the department heads of such-and-such? Even in Government the President always gets a huge amount of air-time when signing and talking about a bill, but the way the US government works, he (and perhaps someday she) had very little to do with all the development, negotiations, sessions in the house or senate, or anything like that which lead to the bill being signed. But again, the news is going to go with the “leader” because they want to hear from the person at the top.

My point is that news articles and posts online are only there to grab attention, and for that purpose they want big names and titles who can grab attention. If people want more details then they move from there to white papers, go to conventions, watch TED talks, and things like that. But news articles are not the right vehicle for that.

Do I agree with how this works? No – the so called “news” has turned more into opinion and hype. It’s probably one of the biggest issues right now that news is marketed the way it is. Opinion and talk shows have in so many ways replaced proper news reporting. But this going way outside the scope of what we need to talk about in regards to the topic at hand. However the point is, getting attention in the “news” and what a “journalists” job is, is not quite as black and white as trying to provide facts to readers.

As for your web-development and design, your to-do list, and the steps you are going to take, that is completely an internal matter. My only intention was to try to bring attention to the things I, and few people who messaged me, saw from our perspective. What you wish to address from those items, and how you address the ones you are going to, is up to you. I am just one voice here, and really never intended to get this far into this discussion. I think you probably have enough of my opinion, and perhaps should see more feedback from others – perhaps everybody else feels all my points are wrong, and so be it.

I will only try to iterate once again that I do not feel that the fees charged by ProHashing are a problem – this is based on my understanding that they are around 2%, though I can’t seem to find confirmation of that right now. I even stated on Discord that I personally felt that for the services provided that I would be fine with 3% or even 4% at my personal point right now. I think, again for you internally and perhaps with feedback from more people, you would have to think how those numbers would impact miners across the scale from people using their gaming rig when not doing anything else, to large sale farms with hundreds of systems. But again, that would be a business analysis you would want to do internally with people who have more access to internal information, and after talking with many more current and potential customers.

[Steve Sokolowski]

HI TechElucidation,

Thanks for your reply! It's been great reading all of your suggestions, and they are so good that I want to implement as many of them as possible.

However, I hope you can understand my disappointment when, after I had spent a significant amount of time reading through all your previous posts and trying to summarize what you said into one location so that they can be implemented, you didn't respond about the list. If I had wanted to ask people internally, I would have done that instead. Here, I'm asking you for your feedback on the list, not other employees.

We have many internal meetings and discuss many topics. Your feedback is valuable and I want to confirm that the things I've recorded here that we can do would accurately address your concerns. We don't want to do these things if they are on the wrong track. Would you reconsider reviewing the list?

[TechElucidation]

Hi Steve,

I will work on a more in-depth response to your post later this evening if you feel there is value in my opinions. I just want to avoid being being a single voice, and therefore sounding presumptuous, arrogant, and overly critical. I am originally British, and we are known for being a little more blunt than most American's like.

[Sarah Manter]

Hi Steve,

I will work on a more in-depth response to your post later this evening if you feel there is value in my opinions. I just want to avoid being being a single voice, and therefore sounding presumptuous, arrogant, and overly critical. I am originally British, and we are known for being a little more blunt than most American's like.

TechElucidation,

We absolutely find value in your opinions and in those of other customers. I believe, from what I've seen, other customers respect your opinions as well. While not always, I hear similar statements to yours from other customers, so we appreciate your time. I am also attempting to post proposed changes in Discord as well as here to keep people informed and encourage conversation and will continue to do that with any ideas / actions spurred by this conversation. Some customers are just more comfortable being vocal than others.

[TechElucidation]

Hello,

My apologies for the really late response, had several expected, and unexpected, items come up this week and have barely had a chance to pause till now.

In regards to the website, you may not be aware that the current website is actually the third design that we have used. The current design was created by Digital Silk, an ad agency who we first started working with about a year ago, and Michael worked to implement their design until it was released on May 9.

I know that I often come over as pedantic, and perhaps put too much focus on specific words, but I am just that way. You mentioned that the design came from Digital Silk, and while I am not a fan of “dark” layouts, the design itself is not what I am trying to make recommendations on, but the marketing. They are two different parts, and perhaps you were just shortcutting by saying design, but did go through an entire marketing/branding/design process with them – for the prince you mentioned, I certainly hope so.

I think another thing people sometimes confuse is marketing with advertising, and they are not the same thing. Design is all about the look and feel. Advertising then uses that design to tell people about yourself. Marketing is what you say about yourself, and what you want people to think about you. It may also be that you did the full-service package from them, but that they really didn’t understand the audience, or (and being fair and calling it as I see it) were following your instructions regardless. I still feel there is a lot of room to make the website pop from a marketing perspective. That does not take a significant redesign or change to the layout – just improving the wording and prioritizing items to highlight what your potential customers want and need better.

But if you are happy (enough) with the website as-is, then as you say you will need to live or die by it. But you did mention that changing the wording is sections isn’t too difficult. The real challenge is trying to find somebody who can help punch up the text and really market you.

While I have probably focused on this more than needed, I did actually want to add a few more comments to this aspect. In what little free time I had this week I spent some time thinking about my post Ethereum life, and was learning about Flux, and actually set out to find a pool where I could mine Flux. After I finish writing this up I am going to try pointing my test machine at a couple to see how it goes. However, as I went through the different pools from MiningPoolStats I was noticing how different they look and feel to the ProHashing website. A couple of things struck me –

1) Pretty much every other pool blasts you with numbers the moment you land. As I start to learn more about what all these numbers represent, I do start appreciating them. No need for me to dig around multiple pages to find them – everything that is important to me is right there to quickly evaluate the pool. This makes landing on the ProHashing page somewhat jarring. I actually found another that felt like the odd-one-out when I went to https://crypto.2mars.biz – it just didn’t feel like a “mining pool site” because of what I was trained for and closed the page without looking at it much.

2) The concept of mining one coin and getting paid in something else seems to be spreading – though nothing like the extent to which ProHashing is capable of – but I can’t recall seeing that on your front page at all. The ones that did at least referenced that up-front, and made it sound like they created the greatest thing since sliced bread – but like I said, it is nothing compared to what your doing. Another marketing opportunity for you - "While other pools allow limited payouts in other coins, Prohashing has the largest selection of payout options anywhere!"

3) I was surprised how many mining pools still seem laser focused on Ethereum mining, I don’t recall a single site talking about the merge and switch to POS only. We are possibly two months out, and I would have thought it would be a good opportunity for pools to start engaging people to switch to the other GPU algos they support in some way – or even trying to figure out what their miners want to do. I know that ProHashing is talking about future coins to support, though not much about what your considering, why, and how you came up with the list you are.

Anyways, page 3 in Word and only addressed one thing so far!

Rather than addressing every single point, I want to try to get a list of items together that we should work on.

So, as I said before, I do feel a little uneasy with some of the topics here. I really have limited internal information on ProHashing to work with. In my previous position I was involved in a lot of acquisitions, and so I actually have a good idea of breaking down operating costs and evaluating a businesses operations. I also know how much information had to be shared in order to do a complete review, and all the legal precautions, getting bonded, and thing like that.

Side note – I seem to recall seeing at some point you mentioning that you had (but now paused) plans to have people come in and audit ProHashing? I assume there was a plan on what you were willing to share with them. If I do remember that correctly, was wondering how much of that potential information would have helped with these questions. However I really may be confusing you with another place that was inviting people to go audit them.

Fees
Goal: Do everything possible to minimize a fee increase later this year (due to war-driven energy costs and massive inflation) by continuing aggressive cost-cutting.

No argument from me on the sale of unused equipment; though always look for charitable opportunities. Again, in my previous position after an acquisition we had extra equipment, and we sometimes found charities that needed equipment and that not only helped us with a tax break, but also gave us opportunities for positive news.

I also wonder if you have done a business case for going virtualized in the cloud? I am sure that you have at least thought about it. I know one of the items you promote is that no cloud hosting company has access to our and your money and data. However considering all the other organizations doing billions of dollars of transactions, in highly critical services, that I think they are capable and trustworthy enough to handing ProHashing in my personal opinion; especially if it helps you with your operating efficiencies and reliability.

Never been a fan of JIRA myself, but there are plenty of pretty good open-source software and tools. It all depends on how capable they are considering your own needs, and how important it is to the management of your operations. And open-source is not always “free”, I did mention I was pedantic and word focused. I was not sure you if you were talking about trying to find a free solution, though they are usually pretty limited, but perhaps you can find one that meets your needs. However even a much cheaper tool may offer substantial savings over JIRA, while still offering a good (though limited) set of options that would better suite your needs.

The next item, the in-person meeting, may be what I was confusion above with the audit – it is 2:40am as I write this, and my mind is getting foggy. Wasn’t sure if you were referring to a in-house (staff) gathering, or a users-conference with miners – in both cases I would agree that if budgets are tight, now would not be the time. However, there are still virtual options, which people are probably just as comfortable. Internally I am sure you guys are probably using Zoom, Teams, or Google chat or something similar to hold virtual meetings. If you were talking about larger sessions with miners, you could still hold something with them, again virtually.

On the item of the lawyers, do stop talking to them directly. If the law firm you have is large enough they may be able to offer you a law clerk, which is usually a much lower hourly rate for general questions and items – though they will often try to get you to escalate to one of the partners for final review and approval. If not there are law services that provide much more reasonable costs by law clerks (or unlicensed overseas lawyers) but you have to be internally very careful to know when and where to use them over a full lawyer.

Website
Goal: Improve the user experience.

• Change text of some sections to better describe the pool's features so that excitement is built around them. Work with TechElucidation to identify which text to change.

I would list this as “marketing”, and the section at the end of “advertising/promoting”.

I certainly agree with the goal of improving the user experience and engagement. Anything that helps to bring people in, and draw their attention a little more to the benefits of ProHashing.

While I would love to help all I can, and despite these long posts, I actually hate reading and writing. I am so dyslexic I have to take frequent breaks reading and writing or else I get incredibly frustrated. Not only that, being born British (to a British English teacher who was incredibly strict), growing up in several countries around the world with different languages, and now living in the US with it's own English – my grammar and phrasing choice is all over the place. All these things play into why I am probably so picky about words.

Have you considered contacting the local [CENSORED] (not sure why the name of higher-education institutes is censored...), and doing an internship / work experience / thesis experience, with a student? I can’t say that you get the very best quality from them, but compared to the price (unlike what you paid Digital Silk), you do get quite pretty good bang for your buck. Just understand what you’re getting into, and set your expectations for what you are going to get out. You will get some work out of them, but my experience is they are more valuable as a fresh set of eyes, challenging your assumptions. At a minimum, they may give you more items for this list to consider and explore, and help with what would help bring them in if they were looking for a mining pool.

Mining servers
Goal: Increase reliability without amplifying fee increases due to inflation.

Regarding the latency portion, I did wonder about the self-hosting vs. co-located vs. cloud options from both a networking capacity and as mentioned above a cost perspective. But also the capability to handle surge capacity, resilience, and things like that. It was actually part of a larger point regarding the ability to deliver a reliable service for commercial miners. But also important in itself, as one thing several popular resources say is that that the response times are critical.

Take a look at these YouTube videos –
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkDws5WRrS0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBOH3CIK3ag
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyZ8JFuF0is
https://youtu.be/37tXQtLhPvo?t=616
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XItiQ8-fp8Y

Using the 2Miners Stratum Ping tool, and a couple of the top servers, and ProHashing, here were my results.

eth.ss.poolin.one:443 = 24.79 ms avg (Located in Virginia / AWS?)
us-eth.2miners.com:2020 = 24.96 ms avg (Located in Virginia)
us1.ethermine.org:4444 = 42.11 ms avg (Located in California)
prohashing.com:3339 = 50.42 ms avg (Located in Pennsylvania / New Jersey)
eth.f2pool.com:6688 = 51.09ms avg (Located in California)

So miners are told that response times are important (though how important they are, and where is a questionable level, I have yet to really find out). However, from the results above you can see (from my location in New Hampshire) Poolin and 2Miners are both around 25ms, but ProHashing is double that despite being in a similar geography. In fact your times were closer to the times I got for a cross-country connection to Ethermine and F2pool.

Like I said, I can’t say for sure that 42ms is “bad” – but when you consider it with other pools in the same region, it does raise questions. And my point about that response time is that if I was a large-scale commercial miner, I would be doing similar tests, and asking similar questions. That time just does not look good, and if that is bad, would I have to worry about other aspects of the pool. For a large commercial miner, details like that probably do matter.

The only other item I would comment on is the optimizations – everybody loves them, and appreciates them when they come – but from a business growth perspective I (from hundreds of miles away) wonder if with your limited resources, this should be a priority. I mentioned above how few pools seem to be planning for the merge, and figuring out (a) how to keep the miners they have, and (b) possibly attract miners from other pools that are nothing strategically planning for it.

I do have Chia plots that I moved over to another pool, and I can’t say that my revenues on there changed much – but the other pool does give a lot more feedback on the farming, which is why it is staying there. You would have to do a hell of a lot to make much of a change to the revenues on Chia, so really not sure that it worth it. RandomX and CPU mining I don’t know a whole lot about, but would also be surprised if there is was value to be added through optimizations there.

Instead I, at least personally, would prefer to see adding options to support post-merge solutions. Something that can help me continue to mine profitability (or for a reason) that I wouldn’t have elsewhere. I don’t know if that is new algos, or trying to expand into the staking and nodding, or something else.

Monitoring and auditing
Goal: Detect more classes of problems earlier, and prioritize which classes of problems we should detect (since there are so many potential problems we simply can't deal with all of them in a timely fashion.)

Being in IT myself, the task of tracking 24/7 operations and getting alerts is always a challenge. I am glad to hear you are using a tool to monitor and dashboard the operations. With so many moving parts something like Grafana can help to visualize the issues. But at the same time, and as you are probably noting since you are talking about the items needing less monitoring, don’t go overboard or else things get lost in the noise and clutter.

It seems a little odd that Chris is the only one being woken up. He may be the best person to fix things, but there should also be an escalation process for getting others woken up if Chris does not respond. Not to mention making sure there is a second resource that care of some of the issues as well.

The last thing I would suggest is making sure you monitor from outside as well as inside. Your staff is always remote according to your career page. What may be worth adding in is having a simple monitoring tool that they can run, say off a Raspberry Pi that sits in the corner of your staffs homes and running 24/7, that can provide feedback from the outside. I frequently use my own remote locations to check on other locations into a mesh form, so if the site itself goes down, at least two others are ‘watching’ it and reporting the outage to my team. That Site 24x7 services is part of it from the outside as they support added features (SSL testing, defacement, etc.), but internally we do more infrastructure testing that way. Lacking multiple sites, using your staff may be the next best option.

Heck, if you did make it simple enough to run of a RPi, you could offer it as an image for miners to run. Put a little “status” webpage on it for them to look at, but then also feedback data to your servers to monitor connectivity from many more different locations. Or if it was a simple tool based off the 2Miners Stratum Ping, and had low overhead, miners could run it from their rigs as a background task.

Another escalation option is to use the people themselves, which dovetails into the next item.

Customer service
Goal: Ramp up the level of service.

Honestly I have no complains in this department, especially in regards to tickets…. So long as you were honest about how people get an initial response within 24 hours due to the 1pm to 5pm daily live support. I think the ticket response is well within the industry norms from what I can tell.

But as a larger “customer service” topic, I think there is possibilities for more engagement. I think Sarah has been doing well trying to bring engagement up on Discord. Here is a blast of crazy ideas off the top of my head - and it is now 5:15am, people are starting to wake up in the house, and so I am really starting to go hazy here.

I suggested (and Sarah is looking into) the possibility of doing a ‘Mine for Charity’ event, trying to show social conscious, and even splitting miners into teams to promote competition. Not something everybody will get involved with, but great for engagement, and coverage. Perhaps even look at inter-pool events, which may help bring outsiders in. Perhaps other events and challenges? Just thought about putting up a small purse (2 ETH or something) and then setting up a special mining service with a very high challenge, and the first miner to solve it wins the purse.

I have found some of your recent posts interesting to read, though would like to see these turn into opportunities for engagement as well. I know they are posted on the forum, and anybody can reply. Others are posted on the Blog, and there are comments there. I was wondering if these topics could be turned into round-tables with miners from the community, possibly bring in somebody from outside, and things like that?

I have brought up the new coins you guys are working on a few times, so perhaps setup “meet your new coin” sessions, letting people learn more about the coin you are adding, some of the background, and if possible somebody from the project itself joining to talk about it. And again, another opportunity for round-tables where you guys can talk about the coins you are considering, and the community can provide feedback during a live session on Zoom or YouTube live stream? Going back to that mining winner-take-all purse challenge suggestion above, perhaps have the project put up the purse and hold the event during the session.

On Discord try to encourage more engagement through a topic of the week. Gives you both insight into what miners are interested in or concerned about, and also encourages them to get engaged. I have had some pretty interesting talks with people, and watched some conversations spread over a few days as people come in and out.

Other possibilities are trying to engage people with a daily “what’s happening in crypto” – even if they are little more than snippets and links to other sites, but something with a market summary, major events, and stick a mining summary at the top for each person if you want to make it miner centric.

Perhaps what you need is a ‘Community Liaison’ position? Somebody focused on trying to encourage engagement not just in the ProHashing discord and forums, but perhaps also work as an ambassador joining other forums and discords to expand awareness of ProHashing, and also trying to line up those round-tables with interesting people in crypto (people from exchanges, pools, commercial farms, crypto projects, etc.) and also trying to set you and Chris up for opportunities to talk about ProHashing with other groups. Not sure how much of this overlaps with what Sarah currently does, but perhaps somebody to complement and assist her.

That same person could also help with the wording on the website – getting to know the community and miners on all levels, and things like that, in order to help add engaging wording to the website.

Just hit the 9th page according to Word, being called to breakfast, and starting to get a little fuzzy… but one last thought to add.

Look into using your existing community of miners more more. I know on discord you can set specialized members, you have “PROHASHING STAFF”, others have “MODERATORS”, and some have multiple levels like “DEVELOPERS” and “SUPPORT”. Perhaps look for some of the more active, knowledgeable, and chatty people and recognize them in some way and use them help again engage the community, perhaps you will find people in multiple countries/time-zones who would be in Discord anyways and can watch for people reporting outages and issues. Perhaps with a little bit of training they can do a quick triage, and if needed, give them access to a button somewhere that would potentially wake people up?

Ok, really, enough…. Breakfast is getting cold.... Just finished trying to proof read this, and it is now 7:10am....

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi Tech,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'm going to write a lengthy response first thing in the morning.

-Steve

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi Tech,

You don't have to worry about late responses. You gave a thoughtful reply, and everything you say is being strongly considered because you put so much effort into your suggestions.


Website

My main concerns with the website wording are:

• There are a lot of customer-requested features, like charts, that other pools are beginning to offer. We need to return to a focus on improving charts to make sure we have the lead in charting.
• Even if time and opportunity cost weren't concerns, it's extremely difficult to figure out what words to use. Even if we've finally arrived at the best design, we might just waste a lot of time picking the wrong words.

The words used right now were specifically chosen by Digital Silk for SEO. Because SEO requires many months to be successful, I don't know if changing them right now will prevent some future gains. I also have no idea what to do with the text if it were changed; while you have recommended some changes, I'm sure others would suggest different ones. Making changes to the mining server is easy; you know that people want it to be stable and have high profitability. For any particular website, a large selection of design and software can be appropriate.

We were told specifically in 2019, two designs ago, that loading up the front page with charts, as we had at the time, was not a good idea, so we changed it in the second-to-last design and even further in this design.


Honesty and trustworthiness

I think that the main issue with the website is that you don't believe that honesty and trustworthiness is the most important feature that we offer. Digital Silk thought so, and that's why the other features are not prioritized as highly in the copy.

They didn't think that payouts in multiple coins or dollar payouts were the best features that we offered. A specific chart is going to draw in only a few customers, while honesty and trust will draw in everyone. They also believed that we had too many features, and if we went with the "features" route for marketing, then the reasons to use PROHASHING would be too difficult to understand for most people.


Ethereum mining

I actually talked with Salad about Ethereum mining, and they suggested two algorithms that they are seeing as the next phase after ETH mining. However, we haven't said too much about Ethereum mining because we don't believe that the ETH developers will come anywhere close to actually meeting the target date.

If you have an opinion what the dominant coin will be after the "merge," we can add that algorithm to the implementation list, GhostRider is expected to be completed by Vance before next Friday, but that isn't a GPU algorithm.


Equipment and cloud hosting

If we weren't in a recession, we would definitely look into charitable donations! Unfortunately, as it stands right now, inflation is going to kill us with salary increases this year, and we need to retain as much money as possible for when that happens.

I don't really have any comments in regards to your other cost-cutting measures. We plan to implement all the suggestions you made there. My only disagreement is that "non-free" software just doesn't seem to be worth the price. There is always a free alternative that's just as good for almost everything, or a free version of a paid product. We would be glad to consider paid products but I haven't found one yet that justifies using it over open-source.

In terms of cloud hosting, we would certainly consider it if there were a reason to do it, but the main reason that I can see for cloud hosting would be if we were to put up many mining servers around the world. Unfortunately, we've never tested the mining servers to see what would happen with high latencies like that, and the ability to have "backup coin daemons" is still down the list of tasks to be implemented, beyond more monitoring and algorithms to succeed ethash. The answer to your cloud hosting question is that yes, we do plan to use both self-hosted servers for money and cloud hosted servers for insecure data like mining servers if we ever are able to implement those features.


Universities

I actually did contact Penn State. Unfortunately, due to the extreme labor shortage at the time, nobody was doing internships anymore because they could just get a part time job at any software company that would transition to full time later. That may have changed now that we are entering a recession and most big tech companies are engaged in layoffs or hiring freezes, but we also need to cut costs and won't be rehiring a support engineer after Paula departs.


Latency and monitoring

In regards to latency, we still have 16 months remaining in our contract with Comcast, and given the number of other things we could focus on, along with your theory that optimizations aren't that important right now, I think we will shelve addressing latency for now.

We do plan to do some remote monitoring in the future, so that's already on the list, and I will add your suggestions about companies that will test for other issues. It's not at the top of the list, but it's something we will definitely do. We actually had a Raspberry Pi that displayed a monitoring system at all times for us, exactly as you described, and we could have distributed the image. Unfortunately, we sold it a few months back when we found that the Pi was worth twice as much as we had paid for it in 2015.


Community engagement

Discord has been an issue for us. We tried to create weekly chats, and only one person showed up to them. Paula and that person spent an hour talking about things mostly other than mining, and then the chat ended. We stopped the chats because they weren't effective, for an unknown reason.

Sarah is already working as a community liason, and I think she's doing a great job! I'd prefer that she talk with other groups rather than Chris and me, because my time is best spent on extremely technical tasks like adding algorithms to the mining server. Right now, we're allowing her to spend a lot of her time taking courses on statistics and economics so that she will take over the blogging and be more knowledgeable in the community outreach area.


Limits

I don't understand how many of these pools seem to be able to offer so many different products, and I probably never will.

Like every other pool, we are limited in what we can do. Previously, we were limited because nobody was applying for our positions. Now that the recession has begun, we received four unsolicited résumes in the past week in support tickets, but like most tech companies, we are making sure to preserve money so we can be in a good position when the recession is over. This recession is the real deal, and the economy is going to crash hard. The Fed is making a huge mistake with its interest rate increases because it erroneously believes it can actually reduce inflation, despite inflation being caused by external factors that everyone thinks are gone (like COVID and the war.) They can't just make the 7 million people who are estimated to be disabled by long COVID suddenly be available to fix the labor shortage.

On the other hand, the companies issuing layoffs are the ones who hired a ridiculous number of people. Gemini had 1103 employees before they decided to fire 110 of them. What does an exchange need 1103 people to do, exactly? The $78b Tether coin is rumored to be run by 12 people. It's no wonder these companies aren't profitable. At worst we would need a freeze, and even now we don't need one. I imagine that as things get worse, we will have a significant advantage over these companies as they need to reallocate tasks.


You

You suggested that we have different levels of community engagement. Would you be interested in being one of the "chatty people" - particularly in Discord - who can help out new miners? If anyone knows anything about mining and being friendly with people, it's you.


Thanks again for all of your comments!

[Sarah Manter]

Honestly I have no complains in this department, especially in regards to tickets…. So long as you were honest about how people get an initial response within 24 hours due to the 1pm to 5pm daily live support. I think the ticket response is well within the industry norms from what I can tell.

But as a larger “customer service” topic, I think there is possibilities for more engagement. I think Sarah has been doing well trying to bring engagement up on Discord. Here is a blast of crazy ideas off the top of my head - and it is now 5:15am, people are starting to wake up in the house, and so I am really starting to go hazy here.

I suggested (and Sarah is looking into) the possibility of doing a ‘Mine for Charity’ event, trying to show social conscious, and even splitting miners into teams to promote competition. Not something everybody will get involved with, but great for engagement, and coverage. Perhaps even look at inter-pool events, which may help bring outsiders in. Perhaps other events and challenges? Just thought about putting up a small purse (2 ETH or something) and then setting up a special mining service with a very high challenge, and the first miner to solve it wins the purse.

I have found some of your recent posts interesting to read, though would like to see these turn into opportunities for engagement as well. I know they are posted on the forum, and anybody can reply. Others are posted on the Blog, and there are comments there. I was wondering if these topics could be turned into round-tables with miners from the community, possibly bring in somebody from outside, and things like that?

I have brought up the new coins you guys are working on a few times, so perhaps setup “meet your new coin” sessions, letting people learn more about the coin you are adding, some of the background, and if possible somebody from the project itself joining to talk about it. And again, another opportunity for round-tables where you guys can talk about the coins you are considering, and the community can provide feedback during a live session on Zoom or YouTube live stream? Going back to that mining winner-take-all purse challenge suggestion above, perhaps have the project put up the purse and hold the event during the session.

On Discord try to encourage more engagement through a topic of the week. Gives you both insight into what miners are interested in or concerned about, and also encourages them to get engaged. I have had some pretty interesting talks with people, and watched some conversations spread over a few days as people come in and out.

Other possibilities are trying to engage people with a daily “what’s happening in crypto” – even if they are little more than snippets and links to other sites, but something with a market summary, major events, and stick a mining summary at the top for each person if you want to make it miner centric.

Perhaps what you need is a ‘Community Liaison’ position? Somebody focused on trying to encourage engagement not just in the ProHashing discord and forums, but perhaps also work as an ambassador joining other forums and discords to expand awareness of ProHashing, and also trying to line up those round-tables with interesting people in crypto (people from exchanges, pools, commercial farms, crypto projects, etc.) and also trying to set you and Chris up for opportunities to talk about ProHashing with other groups. Not sure how much of this overlaps with what Sarah currently does, but perhaps somebody to complement and assist her.

That same person could also help with the wording on the website – getting to know the community and miners on all levels, and things like that, in order to help add engaging wording to the website.

Just hit the 9th page according to Word, being called to breakfast, and starting to get a little fuzzy… but one last thought to add.

Look into using your existing community of miners more more. I know on discord you can set specialized members, you have “PROHASHING STAFF”, others have “MODERATORS”, and some have multiple levels like “DEVELOPERS” and “SUPPORT”. Perhaps look for some of the more active, knowledgeable, and chatty people and recognize them in some way and use them help again engage the community, perhaps you will find people in multiple countries/time-zones who would be in Discord anyways and can watch for people reporting outages and issues. Perhaps with a little bit of training they can do a quick triage, and if needed, give them access to a button somewhere that would potentially wake people up?

Ok, really, enough…. Breakfast is getting cold.... Just finished trying to proof read this, and it is now 7:10am....

I apologize also for the delay in replying. I read slowly and wanted to make sure I had a chunk of time where I could read through and give a thoughtful, if brief, response. Thanks so much for this feedback and the suggestions! I'm making note of the suggestions I think I can pull off now, and we're starting to work toward things like the charity possibilities for down the road. The suggestion about special roles, a similar suggestion to which has been made before, is intriguing the way you pitched it. I'll have to think on how we can work that one.

[Advika]

Hi Guys,YouTube Vanced
I've decided to step away from ProHashing, at least for now. The recent changes in the platform have left me feeling uncertain about its reliability and profitability. I'll be exploring other options in the crypto mining space, and I hope to find a more stable and lucrative platform. Good luck to those who continue with ProHashing.