Status as of Saturday, September 8, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• The upgrades to all servers were completely successful. Chris was able to patch the Spectre vulnerability on all motherboards, which will improve security by preventing bad coin daemons from predicting private keys in memory in other parts of the system. He also installed more RAM, so that our total RAM now stands at 1.05TB, and upgraded CPUs, so that we now have 124 cores total. There were no known issues introduced by the upgrades and that task is now closed.
• Today, I'm going to focus on resolving some division by zero errors in various queries. These errors are preventing expected payouts from being calculated and some miners are unable to view their hashrates because of them. There is probably one day where hashrates were zero for a single algorithm that is causing the issues.
• In addition to resolving some bugs elsewhere in the system, such as by inserting zero values in the "earnings by coin" chart for days that there were no earnings, Constance continues to improve charity mining. There is now a link to the charities' websites available in the "Payout Proportions" when a customer clicks on the "Add coin" button.
• Vance resolved an issue with static difficulties for mining on algorithm-specific ports when the "a=" password argument was not provided. Previously, the "d=" argument was incorrectly ignored and set to the scrypt default difficulty when "a=" was not provided. Now, the correct behavior of assigning the requested difficulty occurs.
• I'll be continuing to investigate ways to automatically monitor things like CPU usage and free disk space and to provide notifications when these things become critical. Hopefully, I'll get to that this week.
• Chris is installing Quark coins and we hope to have Quark available soon. The code for Quark is already running in production, but as always, we are limited more by research into what algorithm coins actually are than by coding.
• The next major improvements, after a period of bugfixes, will be Monero mining and direct exchange payouts. Direct exchange payouts will allow customers to receive any coin offered at a major exchange for payout, even if it doesn't conform to the standard bitcoin API or the ERC20 specification, but the customer will be required to pay the exchange withdrawal fee.
• The next round of maintenance downtime will be to upgrade the database server from Postgres 9 to Postgres 11. We decided to skip version 10 and go right to 11 because of how close to release version 11 is. Postgres 11 includes significant performance improvements in query parallelism that are important for us to take advantage of before the next bubble starts and the system could become overloaded without them.
• Unfortunately, scrypt hashrate declined despite the profitability improvements. We will be commissioning a poll later today requesting customers' feedback on what features of a mining pool are most important to them. While we don't intend on eliminating the increase provided by the scrypt profitability experiment in the near future, the experiment (which increased profitability by so much - over 10% - that if it were important there would have been at least some effect) proved that profitability is not the most important reason for mining with a pool. We want to find out what is.

[citronick]

Let me know if you need any testing to the Quark port - I would like to test my Quark ASICs.

[suykast]

....... (which increased profitability by so much - over 10% - that if it were important there would have been at least some effect) proved that profitability is not the most important reason for mining with a pool. We want to find out what is.[/list]

Solo mining and a payout in another coin is maybe a option
little pools offer this option

[Steve Sokolowski]

....... (which increased profitability by so much - over 10% - that if it were important there would have been at least some effect) proved that profitability is not the most important reason for mining with a pool. We want to find out what is.[/list]

Solo mining and a payout in another coin is maybe a option
little pools offer this option

I'm curious as to why someone would want to do that. Why not just use "c=[x]" and set your payout proportions to the other coin?

[suykast]

those who want to do that arent the smartest, because if this, they mine somewhere else

[grinbuck]

Good morning!
Unfortunately, scrypt hashrate declined despite the profitability improvements.

Steve I'd like to pitch in with my two bits here:

• Scrypt profitability improvements occurred but were not advertised. Neither on the home page of the site or elsewhere. With the massive number of pools and confusing options out there, I feel that the word just didn't get out. That's the only reason why hashrate did not improve.
• As far as I'm concerned, after profitability (which is definitely the MOST important reason for staying on this pool), what I'm after is reliability and uptime. I'm a small miner and even a few hours lost hurts bad. I appreciate all the effort you guys put into keeping the pool stable but fact is that for the last few weeks there have been reliability issues. Backup pools are fine but there also have been occasions (especially on equihash) when the miners stopped mining but did not trigger a switch to a backup pool. Happened with me twice - not recently though. This kind of thing instills some fear and take a while getting around.
• The overall profitability after electricity statistic is one other thing I'm here for. I generally tend to keep all miners connected to the pool and all I'm interested in is whether I turn a profit OVERALL. I don't want to shut down individual units because they're unprofitable unless and until they result in the entire overall operation being unprofitable. At least that's my MO. I'm confident the markets will rebound sooner or later and even if I mine at a 1% profit overall, I'm ok with that. Prohashing is the only pool that lets me easily monitor this.

P.S. On a side note please enable exporting profit stats to excel. The option is currently not present in the menu on the top right of the profitability widget.

[CSZiggy]

People are mining for a profit now? When did that happen?

I've been mining and paying income tax on a loss this whole year so far, unless the coins triple in price i'll be taking the write-off this year.

[cloaker]

it's simply easier to become part of a mining community than go solo for new people and everyone is new at first. You will want to observe operations, learn a few things and possibly pick up any needed help as you go. the question really becomes "what keeps a miner at a particular pool or from going solo?" and this is where pool performance, options, fees and profit come into play. at the end of the day if I can execute the same processes elsewhere AND turn a higher profit thats where i would go. these miners are expensive, difficulty continues to rise, everyone is trying to make it main stream USA, pools have issues with uptime and payouts so when i factor my ROI i have factored in the mining pool....its net payout is the foundation for everything else.

[ajs]

• The next major improvements, after a period of bugfixes, will be Monero mining and direct exchange payouts. Direct exchange payouts will allow customers to receive any coin offered at a major exchange for payout, even if it doesn't conform to the standard bitcoin API or the ERC20 specification, but the customer will be required to pay the exchange withdrawal fee.

@SteveSokolowski I would be interested in an update on the direct exchange payouts status and expected implementation time frame.

[Steve Sokolowski]

• The next major improvements, after a period of bugfixes, will be Monero mining and direct exchange payouts. Direct exchange payouts will allow customers to receive any coin offered at a major exchange for payout, even if it doesn't conform to the standard bitcoin API or the ERC20 specification, but the customer will be required to pay the exchange withdrawal fee.

@SteveSokolowski I would be interested in an update on the direct exchange payouts status and expected implementation time frame.

The current order for Vance, which was taken from the series of polls, is stability and bugfixes, XMR mining, fixing ETC submissions, and direct exchange payouts. You can probably expect the direct exchange payouts sometime in December.