Negative balances change

[Steve Sokolowski]

Later today, Chris will deploy a change in policy as to how "negative balances" are dealt with.

Negative balances, in almost all cases, are caused by miners who request to lower the payout threshold in coins. Transaction fees for most networks are unpredictable, and therefore they are only able to be applied after a payout. If the miner doesn't mine that coin immediately after midnight, (s)he will see a negative balance.

An update today will prioritize elimination of these balances before adding any other earnings. The end result is that for miners who choose to ignore the payout thresholds, a period of time at the beginning of the day will be spent repaying the debts. The amount of money being charged for fees is the same as before, but we hope this change will make it clearer as to how miners' money is being spent.

You can avoid having to pay back fee debts by not incurring transaction fees in the first place. This can be achieved by using the default payout thresholds, or increasing the thresholds over the default. Lowering them below the default incurs fees. The payout threshold is $1, except for bitcoin, where it is $40.

Feel free to ask Chris any questions you might have.

[dfair98]

This does not include the forfeited balances does it? I still show forfeited balances.

[Elanaz]

I get Dogecoin, and on balance I had about 0.0002 BTC. And now at me -0.00029905 BTC. And some more other coins with minus. These are such big kommisiya of Dogecoin?

[dfair98]

I guess it is including the coins that you forfeit, I already mined them once, didn't want them.. thought they were gone forever... but now i gotta mine them again to get them removed? I can understand the over payment neg balances.. just not the coins i didn't want...

[GregoryGHarding]

i will say one thing, if you make me mine coins that i forfeited, il be leaving. so i hope this is a bug if so please credit the forfeited coins youre forcing me to mine currently to the allocation i have set.

[Elanaz]

It seems to me it is a shame to collect such trifles from people. At you and so Buy price - Sell price differ from market. There is a simple example. As you can see a difference in 50%.

[Steve Sokolowski]

It seems to me it is a shame to collect such trifles from people. At you and so Buy price - Sell price differ from market. There is a simple example. As you can see a difference in 50%.

Notice how the number of buy orders in this market at 1 is many times more than the number of buy orders at 2. What often happens in a situation like this is that one person has all the buy orders at 2, and then that person pulls those orders, so we lose money. This and similar issues cost over $100,000 over several years before we figured it out and fixed it.

In situations like this, we have to ensure that there is enough depth to prevent market manipulation.

[Elanaz]

Well, tell then please where money from those coins, which successfully sales disappears? Why in case of successful sale, they don't increase on balance. Such sitation not only with this coin, and with all.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Well, tell then please where money from those coins, which successfully sales disappears? Why in case of successful sale, they don't increase on balance. Such sitation not only with this coin, and with all.

I'm a little confused about the question, but I'll try to answer what I think you're asking.

If you're solo mining, then the coins are never sold or bought, so the price is ignored, and you simply get the coins you mine minus the fee.

If you're pay-per-share mining, the payment rate displayed at the top of the page already takes into account the sale price, so no money is being lost. It is true that the lower sell prices can slightly lower profitability, but the difficulty of coins worth this little is extremely low. In this case, it's 0.06, low enough that a GPU can find blocks every minute. Of the $32,600 earned by the pool yesterday, so little hashrate was dedicated to Vegascoin that customers mining it earned less than a dollar, so the difference is minimal.

If we didn't take this precaution on 1-satoshi coins, what has happened in the past is that someone put in sell orders at 1000 satoshis, mined lots of blocks here, and then pulled them all the way down to 1, and we would lose 1000 dollars on 1 dollar of earnings.

[CritterDog]

Could you just have the forfeit option not active unless there is enough coins that will cover the fees?