Status as of Friday, January 12, 2018
Posted: Fri Jan 12, 2018 9:08 am
Good morning!
- We released several fixes yesterday that customers will be pleased to find out about. First, there was an issue with displaying the error message on the website when a worker had an error. Previously, it displayed a red dot with no text; now, we fixed that so that the message is displayed. Second, we added a feature to make it much easier for Constance to review account data when answering support tickets.
- Of most interest to some people might be that we resolved another of JiveTonto's bugs. It turns out that his issue with duplicate blocks was, fortunately, a display issue. When a block was found, the share that found the block would be associated in the database with a coin someone else was mining, or a merge-mined coin. The reason why JiveTonto believed that blockchains were not advancing was because, by chance, a merge-mined coin that had the same block was being recorded despite the primary blockchain having correctly advanced. This issue had wider-reaching implications, because every query that tried to find which block a share found had some probability of returning the wrong coin. We released a fix last night and verified that the issue was resolved.
- Now that we resolved that issue, we have been able to discover that there are still some coins that, like Bunnycoins, return success on block submission even when the block is invalid. I've identified five coins that have that problem and scheduled them for discontinuation.
- All services will be offline this Sunday evening for the Meltdown security updates. We posted a notice of the updates in the "News" forum.
- Chris received a call from Comcast Entrprise and they moved forward with the installation process. The next step is for their installation contractor to contact him and schedule a time for them to dig up the ground for the fiber line. Once the contractor installs the line, he leaves both ends disconnected and there is a second visit that is scheduled by Comcast to set everything up.
- Coinbase has placed our bank account "in review" through some sort of automated process. They're holding $66,000 that is owed to the IRS and unless we can find a way to get this money out and get a new exchange, we will face critical problems a month from now when our coin holdings will exceed our tax liabilities. We would then be earning profits that we could potentially never be able to sell 50% of to pay the IRS. In addition to applying to Gemini and Bitstamp, Chris submitted a support ticket to Coinbase four days ago, but unsurprisingly, their hundreds of customer service agents haven't responded.
- I find it amazing that we are somehow able to answer all the tickets within a few days with one person working 3 hours per day on them, and Coinbase has about 1000 times the manpower and has not resolved issues like this for 60 days with some people I know. Plus, who freezes accounts before performing an investigation, and what more legitimate reason is there for using a Coinbase account than to pay taxes? Coinbase has surpassed UnitedHealthcare for the worst customer service of any company in the world, and I'll be writing a post over the weekend detailing the action we're going to take against them if they don't release our funds immediately. In short, never leave money in Coinbase; buy or sell quickly and assume that your account will eventually be locked and you'll need to go elsewhere.
- The website keeps running out of memory and restarting. Lots of exceptions are being printed to the logs. We know of two issues - one with password reset requests and one with invalid password attempts, which we're fixing now. There also seems to be a problem with the block explorers, but it's being overwhelmed by these other errors.