Status as of Monday, October 29, 2018
Posted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 1:33 pm
Good morning!
- We're pleased to announced that Monero mining has completed development and testing, and has entered into final testing. It's likely that it could be released sometime this weekend.
- We won't be releasing a new version of the mining server until Monero mining is available. There are a few other things that will be held until then because they are included in the new branch. First, ZCash forked recently, and requires changes to the mining server to support the new fork. They were implemented and are in testing, but ZCash will be disabled until then.
- The NewYorkCoin developers announced that they would be becoming a merge-mined coin. Because of that, I looked into our merge-mining tree calculation algorithm and determined that it was possible to include more than six or seven merge mined coins in each algorithm. The previous issue was that a large amount of memory was needed to calculate the merkletree, due to an inefficient calculation algorithm. I rewrote this algorithm to use significantly less memory. That will allow us to have as many as 20 merge mined coins for each algorithm after the upgrade to Postgres 11 provides us with the database performance necessary to store them.
- The Postgres 11 upgrade is still scheduled for three Tuesdays from now. We tested the system with Postgres 11 and certified that there are unlikely to be any issues with the existing code. Chris, however, is still testing to see how long the upgrade will take. He's confident that it can be done in six hours, but I still think that twelve hours is more likely, given that that's how long it took the last two Thanksgivings we did this upgrade.
- Chris added a new feature that displays errors on users' "Earnings" pages when balances have reached end of liability due to non-entry of payout addresses. Earnings will turn red when balances age more than 90 days, indicating that these balances will be lost if a hack ever occurs to the pool.
- There were a few tickets that came in asking if there was a way to track blocks that were mined by the pool. I added our URL to the coinbase transactions of the blocks we mine in the next release. While this change might seem trivial, any change to how blocks are submitted to networks can cause huge losses of money, so we'll be monitoring for lost blocks. Once released, you can parse blocks from networks and look for prohashing.com in the scriptSig field of submitted blocks. If this works, in a future update I'll add the miner's username too, provided it's under the 100 character limit.
- Coinbase has yet to reply to our tickets. There are instructions in the "news" forum for how to get paid more quickly if you don't want to wait and have only bitcoin earnings. Dollar earnings are still on hold pending their resolution.