Status as of Tuesday, April 30, 2019

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• Yesterday, a new release was issued that did not require any downtime. The release fixed an issue with ethash mining where Ethereum (and possibly other coins) would go into error for on average about 200ms every 45 minutes. The cause of the problem is that the geth client for ethash coins does not provide the gasUsed value for each transaction unless it is queried individually. That would take up to 0.1s, during which time a new block could arrive on the fast-moving ETH network. When that happened, the geth daemon would return an exception for the now-obsolete block's details, and the mining server would respond as designed, placing the coin into error due to the unhandled exception. I resolved the issue by ignoring these errors and moving onto the next block, since there is no need to continue processing the previous block's transactions once a new block has been discovered. The end result is that ethash miners will not be disconnected due to the mining server's triggering of failsafes.
• Vance is working on TRON payout support. TRON is the next coin on our goal of supporting all of the top 20 coins by market capitalization by summer.
• All of the Southxchange markets have been added, which has resulted in several new coins becoming available for mining and payout. The list is available on our twitter feed.
• We've paid out 25 bitcoins without having found a block, an uncommon scenario of low luck that nevertheless is expected to happen about 5% of the time. As a result, we ended up with a reserve of -9 bitcoins in our hot wallets and had to delay payouts. By disabling bitcoin mining, we were able to eliminate the problem, but this problem is expected to continue to recur when we re-enable bitcoin mining until we finally find a block. We have excess coins in cold wallets, and also have a bank account with $265,000 in the worst case, but the delays occur because the keys to those cold wallets are offsite. Importing a private key to a cold wallet takes time, and it is more likely than not that we will find blocks before all that can be done to raise this reserve. The situation is usually best dealt with simply by disabling bitcoin mining and waiting until we find enough lower value blocks.
• There haven't been many of these "status" posts because we've been spending most of our time recently fixing bugs and increasing stability. We expect to continue to focus almost entirely on that for the next two weeks before again turning to new features.

[S3KshuN8]

Perhaps you should rethink the policy of keeping BTC in a cold wallet. Giving yourselves better access to it would also fix this problem, but would not require miners to stop mining in the process. Worth considering...

[Steve Sokolowski]

Perhaps you should rethink the policy of keeping BTC in a cold wallet. Giving yourselves better access to it would also fix this problem, but would not require miners to stop mining in the process. Worth considering...

Miners don't have to stop mining. The issue doesn't affect mining, only payouts. They were simply delayed until reserve increased, and it's unlikely the issue will recur again.