Status as of Tuesday, January 27

[Steve Sokolowski]

It looks like the multiple exchange code has significantly increased profitability. We are approaching Coinking's profitability almost every day now, and there are still some tweaks that can be made with this existing code.

Now that the multiple-exchange code is released and verified, we are moving on to testing the better algorithm for mining multiple coins at once. This new algorithm predicts the behavior of other pools and determines the appropriate amount of hashrate to dedicate to each coin. The main purpose is to not raise the difficulty of coins too far above what we need.

For example, assume that there is a coin that has difficulty 0.5, which is earning 50 cents at the moment. We could devote the entire pool to the coin and mine 100 blocks, at which time the difficulty rises to 25 and the coin is now earning 1 cent. The coin will never recover because it is no longer profitable to mine, even though its price is still high.

But since we were the only pool mining the coin, there is no need to assign the entire pool's hashrate to it. Instead, we should only assign a minimal hashrate because we get paid the same amount of money. Coins should only become unprofitable because the market crashes, not because the difficulty rises. The amount of hashrate to assign will need to be determined after release through machine learning. The rest of the pool can be assigned to litecoins, so that they still earn a good payout while the small group is boosting everyone's earnings significantly.

We paid a gentleman in South Africa to create a tester for this algorithm and it is 2/3 complete. Chris is already regression testing these changes, and we will test the algorithm itself once we have the tester to do so.

Since it is now easy to add more exchanges, I wrote a class to work with Bter. Unfortunately, in the process of writing the class, I discovered that Bter does not support automated withdrawals, nor does it allow users to obtain deposit addresses. The inability to get coins in and out of Bter automatically likely makes it untenable as an exchange. We will submit a support ticket asking them to implement these features and see if they are interested.