Status as of Monday, January 8, 2018
Posted: Mon Jan 08, 2018 10:03 am
Good morning!
- I've been researching JiveTonto's issues with found blocks. What I've discovered is heartening and leads me to believe that we are getting very close to resolving almost all of the significant issues with the mining server. It turns out that the cause of one of his issues is simply that when a block is stale from his own miner having already found it, the system currently doesn't submit the block to the network (because we know it will be rejected.) Therefore, this issue isn't a bug, but a misunderstanding in the design that we can make clearer. If we're getting down to "improvements" versus "bugs," that's a good sign.
- This finding has prompted a minor code change, but major conceptual change, in the way that we handle stale shares. Beginning with the next release, we'll return a "rejected" message to miners for shares that have the primary coin stale, but which have valid merge-mining portions. This change will cause the counts in most mining software to be lower, in particular so that solo miners who mine low-difficulty coins where half the blocks they find orphan each other show a reduced "found block" count. With the current code, the mining software is not provided any feedback to indicate that the found blocks have been rejected, because we designed the system to return "accepted" when any portion of the share is valid.
- Despite this change, the amount of money miners earn will not change. The "miner efficiency" chart will show lower values, and your miners will show more rejected shares, but the mining server will have no changes to the way money is recorded. We'll be modifying the documentation to reflect the changes.
- There still remain two other of JiveTonto's issues that need to be addressed. One of them concerns coins like Bunnycoin, which we found have "charity addresses" that we decided against dedicating the manpower to implement for specific coins. The correct response is to place the coin into error until the next block arrives without charity addresses, but that's not happening for an unknown reason, forcing miners to continue mining the current block over and over. We're continuing to investigate this problem.
- We've started the process of hiring another person. We decided that because the economy is so good, we won't be able to choose the specific type of person we need. Instead, we'll find someone who is excellent, and then find tasks suited to that person's skills. We've reached out to some specific people first, and if they decline, we'll then post the job(s) publicly.
- There will be a release this afternoon. The major features will be the change described above, the ability to see found blocks for the past 35 days instead of the past 12 hours, and bitcoins being paid through Coinbase to eliminate the issues from customers who have balances too low to be paid on the main network.
- We're aware of the network connectivity issues today. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do except wait until the Enterprise-class dedicated Internet line is installed. The contract was signed two weeks ago and they have promised early March as the date for installation.
- If you have an L3+ or an S9 and want to sell it/them, feel free to reply, as we need them for testing.