Status as of Friday, January 4, 2019

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! There is a new release coming tonight. Here's what you can expect.

• Some miners had contacted us about Lyra2REv2 mining issues. It turns out that the problem is that when a coin daemon does not have the private key of the address it is using for mining in its wallet, some information about that address is not returned by several daemon functions, like validateaddress. The mining server had never encountered this error before, and when it happened it triggered the last-ditch safeguard of rejecting shares that could be invalid. We fixed the error by adding the private keys to the 30 wallets that didn't have them present (the multiple-algorithm coins), and the number of rejected shares for all algorithms should be significantly reduced.
• The Monero daemon had desynchronized from the network for an unknown reason. Chris redownloaded its blocks and the issues with CryptonightV8 mining that some customers reported will be resolved.
• There was an error in Nicehash-specific ports that was discovered when I performed NiceHash testing today. It turns out that while the initial difficulty sent to Nicehash miners was correct, a lower difficulty was then sent after the miner sent its username and password, and Nicehash disconnected the miners. Now, the lower difficulty will not be sent after the miner authenticates.
• Constance corrected a few display errors on the website, and fixed some spacing issues.
• In other news, Chris temporarily disabled bitcoin mining because our reserve fell below zero due to poor luck. Letting reserve go lower would require us to spend dollars to buy bitcoins to meet the next day's payouts. When reserve increases, Chris will enable bitcoin mining for a day, and then stop when reserve declines, and will continue this pattern until either a bitcoin block is found or market capitulation occurs and we can buy back the reserve at $980 each, as I expect we'll be able to in a few weeks. Since bitcoins were rarely the most profitable coin anyway, the effect on profitability will probably be less than 0.1%.

[UnknownEntity]

Good morning! There is a new release coming tonight. Here's what you can expect.
In other news, Chris temporarily disabled bitcoin mining because our reserve fell below zero due to poor luck. Letting reserve go lower would require us to spend dollars to buy bitcoins to meet the next day's payouts. When reserve increases, Chris will enable bitcoin mining for a day, and then stop when reserve declines, and will continue this pattern until either a bitcoin block is found or market capitulation occurs and we can buy back the reserve at $980 each, as I expect we'll be able to in a few weeks. Since bitcoins were rarely the most profitable coin anyway, the effect on profitability will probably be less than 0.1%.

Just to elaborate on this: Stop mining bitcoin means -> the sha miners i am pointing at prohashing will stop mining any coins or is it just payouts in BTC will be suspended until reserve increases?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! There is a new release coming tonight. Here's what you can expect.
In other news, Chris temporarily disabled bitcoin mining because our reserve fell below zero due to poor luck. Letting reserve go lower would require us to spend dollars to buy bitcoins to meet the next day's payouts. When reserve increases, Chris will enable bitcoin mining for a day, and then stop when reserve declines, and will continue this pattern until either a bitcoin block is found or market capitulation occurs and we can buy back the reserve at $980 each, as I expect we'll be able to in a few weeks. Since bitcoins were rarely the most profitable coin anyway, the effect on profitability will probably be less than 0.1%.

Just to elaborate on this: Stop mining bitcoin means -> the sha miners i am pointing at prohashing will stop mining any coins or is it just payouts in BTC will be suspended until reserve increases?

There are no changes at all except that the dynamic pool will not select bitcoins to mine. You can earn bitcoins like normal.