Status as of Thursday, July 13, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hi! Here's a few thoughts about today:

• Chris continues to investigate issues with the system, and I plan to work on many this weekend. While there are many reported issues on the forums, there are few support tickets related to them and I haven't been able to reproduce most of the issues. Customers are welcome to submit tickets if they think there are issues, but I think that the pool is operating well for most miners.
• Unfortunately, profitability is declining across the board because of increased difficulties on many networks. Perhaps this is the beginning of my predicted decline toward 0.5 cents in the Fall.
• There were many "balance forfeitures" from "low luck miners" last night. If you received one of these involuntary forfeitures, our theory has been that cloud mining services are contaminated with bad hashrate from firmware that doesn't submit every share.
• Chris will be performing maintenance on Sunday morning, at about midnight EDT, to move the share data from the slow RAID 5 to the fast PRO 960 SSDs in the RAID 1. We haven't yet determined what the impact of the move will be, but Chris will update everyone later today when he figures out whether there will be any downtime. This action is a followup from July 6, when Chris installed the PRO 960s in the servers, and when completed, it should mitigate shares getting behind by 30-60 seconds when high-impact operations, like checking to see if blocks are confirmed, occur.
• I finally was able to develop a plan to use WAMP as internal communication across a number of services, which should allow us to parallelize components even further and increase capacity. I'll be starting this weekend on that. Increased performance is a prerequisite for SHA-256 mining, and this parallelism will help with that. Some great news is that the pool is operating at 1.17TH/s total right now, and is not crashing or getting behind,
  even without these proposed improvements.

[x10604266]

Is there possible to set up a chart to show the average mining difficult in whole networks ? this may help us to know more. Thanks for all your works!

[Eyedol-X]

Any chance you guys will be able to activate Ripple in the near future?

[Maxumark]

I am curious if any of the many "balance forfeitures" from "low luck miners" last night were running L3, or L3+.
As far as I can tell on Wednesday July 12th the L3 and L3+ miners were effectively working with 1.25 hashing board disabled, but were paying the power of full hashing.

[mrgoldy]

FYI, updates like this are much appreciated.
I'm sure you guys are always busy dealing with something, but simple frequent updates, even if everything is good, helps keep the herd calm