Status as of Sunday, July 29, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good afternoon!

• Chris delayed his return from Montreal by one day, so that he could visit a history museum. He's going to depart the city at 5:00pm, get into the United States, and then fall asleep for a few hours, arriving back at around 7:00am EDT. Then, he'll start resolving the 77 support tickets that are backlogged. Again, we apologize for the delays in resolving these tickets.
• There is an unknown issue with Coinbase failing to receive litecoin payouts when a Coinbase payout address is provided to us. The money is sent to the blockchain and is visible on block explorers, but Coinbase is failing to credit customers. Like NiceHash, Coinbase has never replied to any support tickets we have ever submitted to them, except for automated responses that say "we know that purchasing cryptocurrency is important to you." Of course, I never buy cryptocurrency from anyone, including Coinbase. We're not sure how to proceed with troubleshooting this issue at this point; the only thing we can do is to hope that Coinbase replies to our tickets, which may not ever occur. Please be aware that entering a Coinbase receive address as a litecoin payout address could result in missing money until we resolve the problem, and that we can't do anything until Coinbase replies to us, which they may take months to do. Fortunately, this problem only appears to affect litecoins, not bitcoins or other currencies.
• All of the W8-BEN forms have now been checked for errors and resubmission was requested for some of them. Some of the errors were issues like missing signatures, which we will work with customers to resolve. However, some errors involved the upload of incorrect files. In one case, for example, there was an image of a flower.
• We will be changing the documentation shortly to note that, in the case that a customer intentionally puts us in legal jeopardy by purposely uploading incorrect files after multiple warnings, we reserve the right to permanently ban the customer from the use of all of our services and to seize all earnings. Note that this will be the only case in which we will permanently seize balances; honest customers who make mistakes or fail to enter payout addresses will see the normal "end of liability policy" used instead. As a friendly note, it is not our obligation to perform identity verification, these forms are not submitted to the IRS, they are stored offline and will be destroyed in the likely case there is no audit, and in themselves they do not necessarily obligate you to pay any taxes. We simply need basic address information in a few fields, on the right form. If you aren't willing to comply with this one-time basic procedure, then I suggest that you leave before the forms are checked again.
• We won't be able to get charity mining out tomorrow, because I discovered a mistake in its website implementation. I'll be working with Constance to correct the mistake so that we can release it later in the week.
• Vance is hard at work on ETH mining. He thinks it can be released in a week or two.
• Tonight, I'm going to release a new version of the mining server to add a "stale blocks ban list." There have been some customers who are submitting an unreasonably high number of stale blocks, by directing very high amounts of hashrate towards easy coins. Since stale blocks must be recorded and processed (they will be displayed on the website in September to address the issue of customers whose number of blocks in the miner mismatches the number on the website), that slows down the system for everyone. Miners who find themselves disconnected can reduce their hashrate towards these easy coins and they will be reconnected in five minutes.

[cc4506]

That's very interesting about coinbase. Last transfer was on 7/20 for Lightcoin and is automatic as well, went thru fine. Very frustrating the amount of "glitches" in this market.

[Steve Sokolowski]

That's very interesting about coinbase. Last transfer was on 7/20 for Lightcoin and is automatic as well, went thru fine. Very frustrating the amount of "glitches" in this market.

What frustrates me the most is that Coinbase has a huge number of developer positions posted when they are clearly out-developing their support team. They had the audacity a year ago asking for new features they can add, and then later they made a forum post stating that they were "improving their customer service."

I get that tickets can get backed up. I also understand that there is currently a severe labor shortage. It's so bad that the pools I used to go to are closed several days a week because there are no lifeguards, and chick-fil-a is now paying $13 to start. But there's a difference from Chris taking some time to reply to his 80 tickets to Coinbase never having replied to any ticket I've ever sent them, even after six months.

In my opinion, Coinbase has the worst customer service of any company in the world, even worse than United Healthcare, which denied a $1100 claim and was successfully sued over it. I don't understand how they can be so horrible after two years of this, and therefore the only explanation I can offer is that they simply are deleting tickets. As a comparison, Poloniex bragged that they reduced the number of tickets from 150,000 down to 75,000 (!!!) after they were bought out by whatever bank purchased them - and we still received a response from Poloniex within a week.

[cc4506]

Well Netgear is pretty horrible too, odd how such otherwise successful companies fail at something so basic. Shame, I really like the simplicity of coinbase too. Guess I will switch it over to kraken but basically things like this, (money disappearing especially), that gets regulation involved and maybe it should be at this rate.

[hobospices]

Im looking forward to the ethash pool coming online. Do you know if it will support the antminer e3? I'm finding issues connecting to other pools with it. (i.e. nice hash, miningpoolhub)