Status as of Thursday, January 31, 2019
Posted: Thu Jan 31, 2019 9:07 am
Good morning! A new release will be appearing tomorrow. We expect 10-15 minutes of downtime while the mining server and website are restarted, and any initial deployment bugs are addressed. Here's what the release will contain.
- The system will now support "portfolio targeting" mode. In portfolio targeting mode, the payout proportions will ensure that the ratio of coins being earned targets the total value earned over some number of days, rather than the instantaneous value. If the price of a coin rises a lot, then that coin will no longer be earned, allowing the allocations of a trading portfolio to be maintained by mining the other coins in the payout proportions. The existing standard mode will also remain available, where the proportions of the coins being earned are dependent solely upon the current coin prices. This feature was directly requested by several customers in the recent call for new features.
- We're going to remove Quark mining from the list of mineable algorithms for now. There are no exchanges that both have an automated API and also accept US customers that offer coins with the Quark algorithm. If any exchanges meeting those criteria are discovered and able to be implemented, we'll re-add Quark in the future.
- USDC payouts are expected to begin this weekend.
- Authorization failures and disconnect failures will now be listed live on the "Dashboard" page. Some mining software does not display the reason the mining server returns to it for preventing authorization to the server, leaving customers frustrated because the ASIC manufacturer simply states the pool is "Dead" for no reason. Now, it will be possible to leave the "Dashboard" open and watch the error messages appear. An example of an error message that might appear is "the static coin requested to be mined was not found."
- A new type of notification, "valuable found block," is being released. When enabled, customers will be sent an E-Mail informing them that their miners discovered a block worth at least the amount they enter.
- Projected orphan rates of new coins will be increased. We discovered recently that coins where no blocks have been found recently, such as any new coin or bitcoin, are treated as if their orphan rates are zero. Since no coin can have an orphan rate of zero, the mining server assigns too many miners to these coins, assuming their profitability is higher than it actually is. We'll now assume that the orphan rate of new coins is 5%, and have added an override, which will allow us to set bitcoin's orphan rate to 1%. The result will be that the pool will mine more bitcoin cash and bitcoin SV and will earn slightly more profit for us without affecting customers' profits.