Status as of Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:47 am
Good morning!
- Last night, Chris successfully changed the load balancer so that it would better allocate connections to mining servers. Previously, we allocated 1/4 of all IP addresses to each server. Now, two servers have 3/16 of IPs, and the other two have 5/16 of IPs. That should improve CPU usage, and efficiency, until more mining servers become available in two days.
- Now that the "low luck" miners have started to be notified, it's becoming clear that many of the miners are renting hashrate from NiceHash. Please note that renting from a cloud rental service does not reduce your responsibility to ensure that rented miners are working correctly. Customers who use low luck miners will forfeit balances regardless of whether they do so intentionally or not. If you find yourself being identified as having low luck, then we suggest that you rent hashrate from different sources.
- To clarify many forums questions, we do not plan to discuss what is considered "low luck," because this changes over time. We are extremely confident that there are very few false positives, even before enhancements - and if you are targeted as a false positive, mining for a few more days will almost certainly result in returning to normal status. Again, it doesn't make sense to discuss what defines low luck because there is nothing a normal person can do about it; it just goes away by chance over time.
- I plan to spend the next 7 days significantly enhancing the "low luck miners" algorithm with about 10 improvements. The first step will be to expand the scope of the existing identification so that we can increase confidence and withhold even more balances, while removing the few false positives that have occurred so far. Expect some releases over the next few days as we use the information we are now collecting to improve the algorithm. Once finished, I expect that we will be able to eliminate over 99% of these miners. It's feasible that we can improve profits for everyone by as much as 11% as a result of these additions.
- The missing piece in this "low luck miners" investigation is the reason for the miners' existence, which would make it easier to troubleshoot. If it's a defect, we want to know what type of miners have the defect. If it's criminal activity, we want to identify the people or organizations responsible. Whatever the case, it's clear that a lot of people know about this issue, especially if GregoryGHarding's "conspiracy theory" about someone paying miners to run poisoned rigs is true. If Greg is right, and people are participating for profit, then it shouldn't be difficult to turn someone involved. If you are knowingly participating in a low luck scheme, we'll give you $50, release your withheld balances, and grant you immunity from legal liability for past involvement in the scheme if you are the first person to submit a support ticket explaining how the scheme works and what the benefit is for those involved.
- The fiber installation is on schedule to be completed on Friday. During the time the system is offline, the forums and E-Mail will be offline too. It is possible that payouts may be delayed on Saturday, since many exchanges only allow API calls from one IP address and it takes time to change them over. If you expect payouts on Saturday and desperately need the money, I suggest lowering your payout threshold before Friday to be paid as much as possible before the downtime.
- We have an 85% no-response rate on tickets, which to me seems pretty high. I want to try to figure out why so many customers submit problems, then never reply after being asked for more information.
- This week, Constance will be focusing on security issues. First, she will be adding a recaptcha ("I am not a robot" checkbox) to all user logins. Currently, there are about two million invalid password attempts per day from automated robots, and some money is undoubtedly stolen as a result of weak passwords without two-factor authentication. I just realized that the addition of a recaptcha will completely eliminate the ability of these bots to try numerous passwords, which means the criminals will need to employ humans to tediously enter passwords thorugh a time-consuming process. Constance will also be adding an "E-Mail on payout address change" textbox. The system will generate an E-Mail to the address in the textbox when a payout address is added, changed, or when the E-Mail address in the textbox is modified.