Status as of Saturday, November 4, 2017

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• While we wait for this Tuesday's announcement, this weekend I'm going to be performing minor optimizations and bugfixes to the system. One of the issues I decided to investigate is the Coinbase payouts, which for some customers stops functioning and needs to be reauthenticated. Coinbase has updated their API since we wrote the code for these payouts four years ago, and we are bleeding money by using bitcoins to pay through Coinbase. I decided to mark this area for complete redevelopment. We'll use their new API functions and switch the coin to be sold to litecoins so that we don't have to use the expensive bitcoin network.
• I'm going to make a few changes to the mining server today. First, I'm going to disable some coins that are very easy from mining, because the stale shares caused by the excess CPU load outweighs the miniscule profitability they provide. Second, I'm going to make the system aggressive at disconnecting "idle miners." For some reason, there have always been miners who connect and then never submit any shares. Since they take up just as many resources as other miners, idle miners will now be disconnected after a few minutes so that more miners who actually want to mine can connect.
• We continue to receive a massive number of support tickets from people who want to register. We appreciate all the interest, but we ask that you don't submit a ticket asking for an account, since all new capacity needs to go to existing customers first. We really want to open new accounts, but there is nothing we can do right now. Submitting tickets means that Chris's time gets taken up selecting canned responses instead of working towards increasing capacity. Thanks!
• Chris had an idea about why there might be stale shares. While our sustained bandwidth is low, the instantaneous bandwidth required to send data to 10,000 miners when a coin like litecoins has a new block may hit our upload bandwidth limit. Chris is going to try raising the limit to see if adding additional bandwidth might result in a reduction of stale shares.

[AshleyCuneo]

Good morning! Thanks for keeping us updated! This thread is really informative! Updating the statuses is a good sign of kindness from your end!