What we recently accomplished:
- Chris modified our trading code to replace all the instances of floating-point arithmetic with more precise decimal arithmetic. The result will be more accurate trading and fewer payout errors.
- The mining server was released to remove work restart testing and replace that with a better algorithm that computes the time required for work restarts without testing. Information about what was changed is available in the "news" forum.
- Problems specific to coins like Ethereum and NXT during payouts were resolved to make those payouts more reliable.
- An issue that displayed incorrect mature balances, which had been present since the site was founded, was resolved.
- We upgraded the database to the release version of Postgres 9.5.
- Chris discovered that some coins, like Novacoin and its derivatives, use six decimal places instead of eight to communicate block rewards. These coins were therefore listed at profitabilities 100 times lower than reality. A fix for this issue was deployed last week.
- The hashrate notifications were off by a factor of 1000, so some miners were receiving notifications when their hashrates exceeded strange values. The issue was resolved in mid-January.
- Chris deleted all of the coins that were listed in Cryptsy and we permanently removed all code that contacted Cryptsy from our servers.
- Chris forced payouts to customers with inactive accounts so that our our outstanding liability was reduced.
- Factom was requested for payouts. Factom has an "alpha level" API with little documentation, so this task will be challenging. We've marked it down as a future upgrade.
- Some customers complained that the database gets behind periodically during maintenance tasks. Unfortunately, there are only two ways to prevent that from occurring: to disable coins and reduce profitability during those tasks, or to buy more servers. We think that reducing profitability is worse than allowing statistics to get out of date for a few hours, and it isn't profitable for us to invest money into more servers at this time. However, Chris is going to look into running these tasks during times when there will be less disruption to users.
- There are a few website requests that we've added to our list of things to do, like the ability to delete low balances, but since we always place profitability-related tasks above website upgrades, Factom and adding new coins will be prioritized first.
- In February, we don't plan to add new features to the pool. Instead, our focus will be on resolving issues reported by customers, automating tasks that waste a lot of Chris's time like dealing with coin forks and payout failures, advertising the pool, and promoting the adoption of cryptocurrency.
- At this point, the greatest threat to our business is the delay in cryptocurrency adoption being caused by the Bitcoin Core developers. We believe that we can actually make more profit by pushing to work around the obstructionist developers and theymos than by resolving every last issue with the pool. That's why we're currently devoting so much effort into our altcoin BIP101 implementation.
- Chris is going to be looking into search engine optimization to raise the profile of the main site. The forums already rank high in search engines.