Status as of Monday, February 20, 2017

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Feb 20, 2017 9:02 am

Good morning! Here's a status update:

The DASH developers were extremely helpful and resolved the last known issue in X11 mining for us. The current status of X11 is that Chris has set up the virtual machines and coins for the test system, but is in the process of setting up the database. It will probably be about one week until the test system is ready to go now that the issue has been resolved. You can read about the resolution to that issue at viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1083.
We are aware of a number of concerns that have been raised to us over the past few weeks. We have delayed implementing fixes for all but the most pressing ones, because we currently have two forks and want to get the multiple algorithm code deployed. Then, we can eliminate the old fork and press forward.
After X11 is out, our next task will be completing our taxes, which is expected to take 100 hours. Then, we are going to do some system cleanup, which involves paying out balances and closing inactive accounts to reduce our liabilities. After that, we will be eliminating some features that are rarely used, so that we can reduce the amount of testing we have to do going forward. The only way to really know if features will be used is to add them, so we expected that we would have to do this at some point. One of these features is the REST API, which has been discussed in a different thread and is scheduled to be replaced with WAMP, something we already support and which provides more accurate, real time data. If you use the REST API, you have one week to speak up before it will be scheduled for permanent removal.
After we do that, the plan is to spend April and May adding some user-friendliness features. For example, we want to better handle the circumstance where an unexpected issue causes balance adjustments. The system was designed to be very resilient in the area of preventing losses, but attention hasn't really been paid to making sure the user interface explains what happened when we need to increase balances to correct a calculation issue. Right now, these issues appear as missing bars in the "hashrate" charts, which can be confusing to users and make it appear inaccurately as if they didn't earn any money during that time.
Finally, in May and June, we will focus entirely on customer requests for improvement to add some of the things that people have asked for, like better navigation of graphs and better earning tracking.
Depending on the success of the rollout of X11, the summer may also see SHA-256 support added. We're still unsure about SHA-256 because the reserve requirements to avoid bankruptcy with 95% certainty right now would be about $37,500 (three bitcoin blocks), and SHA-256 mining with multiple coins doesn't have the 30-50% gain that scrypt mining does. We do not currently think it is profitable to add support for some of the GPU algorithms with only five or ten coins, as some of these algorithms barely generate $2500 in profits per day to all miners across all coins, but perhaps we might be proven wrong when we look further into these.

As always, comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome.