Status as of Monday, January 1, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• We discovered an issue with the "worker history" chart that could cause it to have interrupted lines for some customers. The issue has been resolved and the changes will be deployed with the next release. Since this issue is not causing any loss of money, we don't deem it serious enough to justify a release all by itself.
• We discovered a second issue where some coins submit the same blocks over and over at the same height. We added a failsafe to put coins into error when that happens, but were not able to determine the cause. The failsafe will go out with the next release. We hope to include the actual solution to the problem in that release if we can figure out what it is.
• Another improvement that was released was that payouts will now subtract the estimated transaction fees before payout and pay customers less, rather than running customers into negative balances due to the transaction fees (if they ignore the threshold). The purpose of this change is mainly to reduce support tickets from customers who didn't understand why balances became negative.
• Chris released a change to automate the payout of customers who have been inactive for 90 days. Those customers will have their balances cleared to zero, minus the transaction fees. Chris will no longer have to do this manually, so it will always execute exactly at 90 days.
• At 12:15am, Chris released a new version of the website that includes tax information. You can see the fields in the "settings" page. You can fill them out now and forget about them, or you can wait until you earn $600. If you don't earn $600 this year, you won't receive a form at all, and nothing will change regardless of whether you provide information or not. You can also certify that you are not involved with the United States by reviewing the guidelines on the IRS website, in which case you will not receive any paperwork. Further details are in the documentation and we can't give advice as to which option you should select. There is also a helpful "2018 taxes" thread that perhaps AppleMiner or someone can link to in this thread that includes posts by us about how we perceive this pool's tax liability.
• Normal support will resume tomorrow with the end of the holidays. Thanks for your patience during this reduced support period.

[zafar177]

I tried to submit that the tax laws do not apply to me but the page failed to update.

[JiveTonto]

as per item two steve

"long polling in the Bitcoin client rushed as quickly as possible to send out the notifications of a new block being discovered to miners -- so quickly that some miners could request new work units before the client had finished processing the new block and they got work units based on the old block'


any chance?




and



"" The pool checks if the share is stale by seeing if it has a record of the work unit and clearing all work unit records when the chain changes. So if something goes wrong with the work unit tracking process, that will result in a stale share being reported""


resulting in our orphan rate?




Orphan bonuses
''. Prohashing attempts to mine the next block on top of its previous orphaned block, therefore earning both the previous block's income and the current block's income if the current block is found. If the second block is also orphaned, then the expected value of the next block will be around three times normal. Miners end up being paid more, and the orphan rate of the pool is reduced""



i disagree its taking hashrate away from the higher difficualty coins that just need to grind,if merge mining restarts wernt enough of a distraction for the miners then they get pulled by this for another work unit restart. No wonder we dont find many higher diff coins any more

[Eyedol-X]

With the addition of 1099 tracking for earnings, now all you guys need is support for SHA256 and GPU mining and you'll be a one stop shop for US Miners who want to make sure they are paying appropriate taxes on their earnings.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Chris fixed the problem with the form submissions. It turns out that he hadn't added a row to the table and the database wasn't able to get the name of the form. I apologize for that.