Status as of Tuesday, November 18

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's today's status:

• Yesterday's release fixed many significant bugs, reducing the number of work restarts by almost 50% to our test miners, much more than anticipated. Interestingly, the release uncovered other bugs that did not occur because they were prevented from becoming significant by the ones we fixed.
• The latest issue is of "duplicate shares." The reason for the duplicate shares is that the "extranonce" value sent to the miners is being duplicated, but because there were so many work restarts before, the issue would never be a big problem. I have a fix for this issue and will release it this evening if testing goes well.
• Some miners appear to have had a hashrate increase of as much as 10% due to the reduction in work restarts. The reduction in duplicate shares later today should help these miners become even more profitable.
• Other remaining issues include coins not coming back online after cryptsy's "locked wallets," which I am working on, and the issue that old coins can't use sendmany to issue payouts because they use buggy code forked from an old version of bitcoin. To fix those issues, I'll just use sendtoaddress for each payout.

Expect a 2-minute outage later today while I restart the server to eliminate the "duplicate shares" issue.