Status as of Sunday, March 18, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• My focus the past few days has been changes in how authorization is handled by the mining servers. I discovered an erroneous assumption that actions can be taken based upon IP address. Since there are cloud mining services that make many connections through one IP address, banning an IP address due to one misconfigured miner on that address causes collateral damage. I changed the code to ban misconfigured users by username.
• A side effect of the change is that miners can now more effectively mine static coins using cloud mining services, because previously the rule preventing frequent static coin changes counted the number of changes per IP address, rather than by username.
• Also in last night's release was some code to cause more coins to go into an error state. For example, coins will now enter error when the exchange's block number differs from the daemon block number by more than a configured number of blocks, eliminating losses due to forks. If this causes an increase in profit, we can pass on the money to customers. Ideally, we will be able to hire enough people that, someday, we can reduce these type of losses by 40%, and therefore lower fees by 2%. But since we haven't been able to find a lot of qualified candidates, and because we don't even know if that's possible, that would be far in the future.
• I'm going to spend time today working on the ability to hotswap functions in the mining server, which will reduce the number of restarts necessary to resolve minor bugs. This should address a report by some owners of miners whose equipment fails to reconnect.
• Constance's current work is on improving the performance of the website. This issue is one that I had wanted to address for a long time, but we never had enough manpower to stay ahead of the minor bugs that have already been fixed.