Status as of Thursday, November 6

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's today's status:

• Chris attempted deployment of a fix to obtain more accurate pricing last night, but was unsuccessful. He reverted to the previous version of the mining server about 4 minutes later, and we'll revisit that issue over the weekend to see why that code failed in production but not in development.
• I posted a message to the "Support and feedback" forum about coins where the blockchain isn't advancing because nobody is mining them. Feel free to read it if you are requesting payouts in minor coins. The system sends payouts in those coins as would be expected, but if the blockchain doesn't advance, then customers are responsible for ensuring they choose coins where miners will confirm their payouts.
• I am still trying to get feedback on the single-coin mining option to see if that is a worthwhile feature.
• This weekend, I plan to continue fixing bugs. Chris is trying to reproduce the bfgminer fork issue to see if there is a reason why some bfgminer versions don't work with this pool, but he can't reproduce the problem.
• I've been looking at the payouts on PoolPicker and noticed that you'll almost never see us at the top of the charts, but over time we average in second place. The reason is that the other pools are not pay-per-share pools, so there seems to be high variance in most of those pools. For example, we beat Wafflepool two days ago, and got crushed by them today, even though our payouts differed by only 2 satoshi between the two days. The problem with looking at the green bars is that they are trailing indicators; by the time you see that a pool has a green bar, the day is already gone and the next day has little correlation to the previous day's earnings. We need to make the benefits of steady payouts clearer somehow.