Status as of Friday, December 15, 2017
Posted: Fri Dec 15, 2017 9:07 am
Good morning!
- This weekend, we're going to look into developing a new policy against hard forks. There are some coin developers that are placing an inordinate amount of work upon us by creating constant hard forks and requiring us to upgrade the coin's software weekly or sometimes multiple times per week. PIVX, for example, is one of these coins; the PIVX developers cause us to spend a lot of Chris's time, cost a lot of bandwidth, and generate customer dissatisfaction and support tickets. Most likely, the policy will be that we will discontinue coins that hard fork more than once per month, or some other minimal time period. We're all for progress, but some development teams are not following reasonable development practices and need to either do better testing or hold features to minimize inconvenience for users and exchanges.
- The two issues holding up SHA-256 mining are building up a reserve, and support tickets caused by minor bugs. The issue of building a reserve is only hindered by whether we can change those 1450 litecoins to bitcoins quickly enough before bitcoins rise in value even more. As an aside, this is another example of why you only control cryptocurrencies when they are not in exchanges. We need about 50 bitcoins to be able to start SHA-256 mining, and are hoping for a crash because the price of bitcoins is irrelevant to how many are awarded for each block.
- We also need to resolve a lot of minor bugs with payout issues before we can start offering SHA-256 mining, because the support tickets from them become overwhelming.
- We will be hiring a dedicated customer service representative in mid-February. We plan to post flyers around the campus when students return in the third week of January. The idea will be for the student to work 1-2 hours every morning to answer trivial tickets and triage the more difficult tickets to the appropriate person.
- We will also be posting a short-term task for someone who wants to make extra money during the holiday week of Dec 25-29. The goal will be to go through all the coins at a list of exchanges and produce a spreadsheet with three columns: coin name, algorithm, and source code URL. Finding the algorithm of a coin is surprisingly difficult, and involves looking through source code and searching the Internet for forum posts. If you're interested in this position, keep looking out for it in the "news" forum later this weekend. Once we have the list, Chris will be able to install all the coins that are listed as SHA-256 immediately and reference the list in the future when new algorithms are added.
- Some customers reported unusual earnings yesterday, but I haven't been able to find the issue because the tickets aren't able to provide much information to come up with a reproducible case. Chris will further investigate the problem this afternoon and make share corrections if any are warranted.
