Status as of Thursday, July 19, 2018
Posted: Thu Jul 19, 2018 10:40 am
Good morning!
- Please join me in wishing Chris a happy birthday! He turns 30 today. Since he doesn't always read the forums regularly, feel free to submit a support ticket and I'll make sure it's assigned to him.
- I think I figured out how the covert ASICBOOST miners work. You might recall how, a few days ago, I stated that I was beginning to get down into examining why the mining server was making choices so that we can begin understanding things like why coins went into error and why miners got disconnected sometimes. It turns out that some miners are receiving error messages for submitting ASICBOOST shares without having first used mining.configure, the stratum protocol standard for overt ASICBOOST. The S9s, I think, don't register as ASICBOOST miners and simply submit the ASICBOOST shares. Since I don't have one of these miners, I can't test with it, but I will make a change to stop rejecting these shares as invalid and then hopefully someone can try to enable the "multi-version" command on an S9 to see if it works once we release later today.
- We are targeting a release of charity mining for July 30. This code, which is a significant change to many system functions, will require some downtime that day. The time of the downtime and duration will be announced next week. Once released, we will be able to easily support a number of new features in the coming weeks. For example, we can offer free ETH payouts through Coinbase, tips to Constance or Vance (instead of just Chris), and other dollar exchanges than Coinbase.
- We will be entering reduced support mode between July 24 and July 27, when Chris attends his yearly meetup with his Steam friends in Montreal. During periods of reduced support, the most recent of which occurred in April with the connection upgrade, urgent issues that involve money are addressed immediately, while general questions about the pool like how to connect may see a response time of 2 or 3 days.
- For the first time in perhaps ever, due to the resolution of most mining server bugs, earnings are matching payouts and luck to 99% accuracy. Therefore, we increased payouts by 5% on x11 and 1% on all other algorithms. We estimate that the current capacity limit is now somewhere near 200,000 workers.