Status as of Friday, August 11, 2017
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2017 8:44 pm
Hi! Here's a brief status update.
- I got the support ticket queue down to 46. The biggest issue I'm trying to get a handle on right now is whether there are still any balance issues, or whether the tickets in the queue are from previous days, with earnings now back to normal. I replied to 10 tickets about that subject and I hope that those people will reply back by the morning so I can investigate if any issue remains.
- We are still in reduced support mode. While I plan to resolve easy tickets, there are some very difficult issues, like why certain coins are not paying out, that will need to wait until Chris's return on Wednesday.
- There are a few minor issues I discovered that were not caused by the release and which are not affecting balances, but which may be causing other problems. I will investigate these on Saturday. On Sunday, I plan to work the ticket queue down to zero or as close as I can get. That means that fixes will happen Saturday, and then you'll see replies to tickets Sunday.
- On August 20 and 22, we plan to devote the 24 hours we will be on the road to and back from the eclipse to market research on the future of the project. There are a lot of questions we need to answer. Some examples: what profitabilities are reasonable a year from now, what price will the bottom of this bubble cycle be, is the pool profitable enough to hire one or more people, what features should those people work on, would dramatic expansion run into any laws we aren't aware of that would make the business unprofitable, what is the best timeframe for changes, whether the impending end of Bitconnectcoin mining will mean a halving of scrypt profitability, the odds of ETH ever going POS, and so on. The goal is to come to a final decision on this by the weekend of Sep 10 and implement whatever (if anything) is decided by the end of October.
- The release last week appears to have completely eliminated our problems with share recording, which implies that we can experiment with relaxing difficulty constraints tomorrow. I plan to do that and will update people.
- The release did not fix, and was not intended to be able to fix, the stale share issues. That issue is caused by coin assignment overload, with the server being unable to send work to miners in time. Fixing that issue is unlikely to occur until early October because there is no option where enough experienced manpower would be available to accelerate the fix to that complex problem. Nevertheless, the system is still profitable even with stale shares in the meantime.