Status as of Friday, January 1

[Steve Sokolowski]

Happy New Year! Here's today's status:

• I said earlier that we would spend most of the holiday week working on trying to get as many issues as possible out of the system. We're down to the very minor problems now, and I'm going to spend today and the weekend writing tests to detect issues in the future.
• Chris will perform a release later today to optimize coin selection for network latency. Previously, lost mining time due to network latency was not considered in coin selection. Now, slightly more hashrate will be assigned to easier coins because the latency was causing our calculations to overestimate how much hashrate we were assigning to these coins. The change should reduce our losses due to bad luck, and increase miner profits by assigning more hashrate to the most profitable coins.
• We released a change to our block explorers to group inputs by transaction in the "wallet" block. Now, large transactions with many inputs won't be repeated, and instead the total of all inputs will be displayed once for each transaction in a wallet. The change is effective immediately.
• We made various changes to the earnings page in an attempt to reduce customer service requests by eliminating the confusion that led to the requests. For example, some coins have a minimum transaction size. Confusion over why extremely small amounts weren't paid out led to questions, so the issue was added to the documentation and the payout threshold now is always greater than zero for those coins.
• At some point soon, we plan to add support for API calls so that developers can obtain information from our site. If you have any requests for specific calls, feel free to post replies here.
• Please attend tomorrow's discussion on reddit's /r/litecoin forum where there will be an opportunity to ask the litecoin developers about their plans for future development of litecoin. A strong litecoin network benefits everyone - merchants, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, and miners, so be sure to voice your opinion there.

[JarBinks]

API Request(s):
- Average pool Earnings, in BTC, and maybe comparable LTC, in BTC, for a period. (1,2,3 hours...whatever but less than 24 hours)
- Current Balance, in requested payout coins, for an address (specific coins mined/Balances/Status would be interesting but not all that important)

[Steve Sokolowski]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm hoping to get the second one done soon.

The average earnings over periods of hours is a complex query that may place too much load on the system. Unfortunately, that one will take longer and require more investigation.

[Steve Sokolowski]

The second API calls are finished. There will be a number of calls that obtain information about miners in the next release.

I decided that we can't implement the first call unless we have more requirements, because it takes up to a minute to run that query. Daily earnings are easy because they are summed continually for payouts, and instant earnings are easy because few rows are needed. I want to find out what the use case for that data is, because perhaps there might be a better way of getting the information for the task. I can see why instant earnings are useful (to switch to the pool), and why daily earnings are useful (to determine if the pool is profitable over time), but I'm missing how hourly earnings would be used.

For more information, when I ran the queries myself, I determined that the earnings of the past hour don't generally differ from the daily earnings. What happens is that there are periods of 1 minute or so where profitability reaches 30 cents, and then there are long periods of profitability of 3.5 cents. The high profitability periods are approximately equally spaced throughout the day, and because the periods are shorter than an hour, they get averaged out in both longer durations.

Comments?

[JarBinks]

Awesome Thanks!!

Maybe a Running 24 hour profitability that uses cached data updated every hour?

Use Case:
In general I rent my hashing.
In order to determine current profitability I am using a "Based on LTC" approach.
First I determine the pools profitability compared to LTC for the past X days. (%)
I then apply that to the current LTC mining profitability in BTC.
LTC/BTC trading pair is taken as the average from multiple exchanges.
This gives me an estimated pool profitability in BTC that takes into account diff changes and exchange fluctuations.

As you say this takes a not insignificant amount of code, data acquisition and processing to calculate.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Would it be fine if we provided this information for 15-minute periods, rather than hourly periods?

[JarBinks]

I think so.

So each time I access the endpoint it would give me the average profitability for the prior 15 mins?
If I call it every 5 mins and average the result over a 24 hour period I will get an average of an average?

[Steve Sokolowski]

The average of the 15-minute averages alone would not equal the 24-hour average. The reason is that the hashrate present during each 15-minute average would differ. The 24-hour average would equal the sum of each 15 minute average times the pool hashrate at that time.

The idea with the 15-minute hashrates is that the shares are scanned every 15 minutes so that the query doesn't get out of hand. Since we are already scanning all those rows, it's a simple task to compute the profitability at the same time. And since those aggregate statistics would be entered into the same table, the API call could obtain the profitability at little additional cost by simply reading different columns of the same rows when getting hashrate.

[JarBinks]

Right, I get your point about including the hashrate.

Sounds like a plan.

Thanks!!

[andrewhome]

i purchased 3
ltc-Litecoin-Scrypt-ASIC-Miner-mining-8G-USB from ebay....
followed instructions for
CGMINER and for their own proprietary LKController but can't seem to get to work on win 10...
any help please?
i tried this
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://prohashing.com:3333 -u andrewhome -p x--gridseed-options=baud=115200,freq=850,chips=5 --hotplug 5 -r password
and this
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://prohashing.com:3333 -u andrewhome -p n=workerabs1cpu1a -r password

any ideas?