Status as of Tuesday, June 21

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Tue Jun 21, 2016 4:55 pm

Good afternoon! Here's a status update for what we accomplished over the weekend:

One of the major tasks we finished is the new "Live coin status" chart on the charts page. For a while, we've needed a way to see deeper into the system to see what is happening at any given time. We decided that we might as well make that a polished chart and publish it on that page. The cards update in real-time with hashrate, profitability, and more. Please check it out and offer comments.
Earlier in the week, we released a fix that significantly reduced work restart frequency for auxiliary coins. A merge mining restart only occurs when the profit lost before the primary block is expected to be found would exceed the loss in profits due to the work restart. Some coins have actual block times that are significantly less than the target block time, and those coins are so fast that they never need a work restart for merge mining. It turns out that a merge mining restart would be scheduled for miners based upon the target block time of a coin, not its actual block time. Now, the actual block time is used in the calculation, resulting in the correct number of work restarts being sent to miners for this reason.
In the "expected payouts" chart, we modified the "LTC" reference payout. It turns out that the previous rate didn't account for the expected orphan rate of 2.5% for litecoins, so we reduced the value of LTC by 2.5%. Note that this "LTC" value is a perfect value for solo mining, and it cannot be earned at any pool because no fee is included.
Speaking of orphan rates, our next challenge is reducing the orphan rates of some coins. I spent several hours yesterday trying to determine why orphan rates are higher than what would be expected, but wasn't able to come up with anything. We aren't clear when orphan rates became higher than expected, but it was clearly before the performance improvements were added earlier this year. This may have been a problem since the beginning.
We deployed a fix to improve slippage, which will avoid selecting coins that have markets where large sell orders suddenly disappear. This behavior is similar to what we noticed in November 2014, but back then the sell orders that were suddenly pulled would be very small. The slippage itself wasn't the problem, but the opportunity cost of selecting a suboptimal coin where slippage would result in less profit than we could have made in mining another coin caused losses. This issue has been resolved.
After confirming that the "low luck miners" issue had been resolved, we began passing on an additional 4% to customers on Saturday. We hope to confirm that additional percentages can be passed on in the coming days.
This weekend, we returned to surpassing Clevermining in profitability. On Saturday and Sunday, we made more than they did. Yesterday, our profit was about 2% less than Clevermining. When we reduce orphan rates to what they should be, we expect to reach 8% over Clevermining from that improvement alone. Given this, we plan to start heavy advertising on Monday, June 27.
Chris resolved issues with payouts that were due to a missed Ethereum withdrawal from an exchange. The Ethereum client has a serious bug where it will queue transactions rather than rejecting them for insufficient funds. Chris had to create a new wallet to eliminate the queue, and we may recompile Ethereum to change this behavior.
I don't have time to do so now, but I have several topics queued to write about in the Prohashing Blog. I want to comment upon the latest book about Craig Wright, why Ethereum should fork, that Ethereum is not dead and the predictions of a bitcoin crash are about to happen, and how we resolved the problem of "low luck" miners.
The increased payout threshold for bitcoin has now taken effect. Again, I apologize for this step, but bitcoin transaction fees have become too high for us to continue paying them at a $2.00 payout threshold. You can still wait for $10.00 to accumulate, ignore the payout threshold, or choose another payout coin, which will pay at a $1.00 threshold.