Status as of Saturday, June 11
Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2016 9:37 am
Good morning! I think that we made significant progress in identifying the many causes of issues that had been occurring recently.
- A few nights ago, we made the "low luck miners" query more strict, and it has been identifying more miners who have absurdly low luck. As before, none of these miners has complained that their balances are disappearing and we still can't figure out why they disappear so quickly or why they even mine in the first place. Correcting this issue alone is expected to cause a total profitability increase of 17% by the time we pass all the funds on to customers beginning Monday. We are passing on 2% more than we did yesterday, tomorrow we will pass on an additional 2%, and then on Monday we will pass on another 1% and hold at that level. Our numbers indicate that there is another 2.5% to be gained by fine-tuning this query even more.
- Chris discovered that profitability had been reduced because many coins were in error. I was surprised how the elimination of just a few coins from being able to be selected had such a significant impact on profitability. While some of the coins had been fixed yesterday, the full impact of the fixes won't be noticed until today.
- As stated elsewhere, the system no longer changes a miner's variable difficulty to mine easier coins. Instead, it assigns other miners to those coins and takes a work restart penalty if necessary. Miners have found that less money is lost due to the penalty than due to decreased hashrate caused by changing the difficulty. Miners with a static difficulty were never affected because their difficulties were never changed even before this update.
- We made another change this morning to better calculate block times when assigning hashrate, and would like assistance in determining if the change has positively impacted miners. The change is more aggressive in preventing miners with high work restart delays from being assigned to coins with fast block times. It is important to note that miners will still be assigned to fast coins occasionally - for example, PLNcoins this morning were earning 15 cents, and it was worth mining them even though some miners lost half their hashrate doing so. In marginal cases where a fast coin is only slightly more profitable than a slow coin, miners will now be more likely to be assigned to the slow coin. It would be great if some miners who were encountering hashrate drop issues, like Critterdog, could comment on whether they see that problem very often anymore.
- Finally, Chris said that some customers had suggested to him that they would mine more if they could ensure regular payout times. These customers are requesting payouts in bitcoins. Unfortunately, we can't guarantee payout times in bitcoins, because we need to receive withdrawals from all exchanges first, and the exchanges face an overloaded network just like we do. If you need to be paid every day at the same time, we suggest creating an exchange wallet in litecoin or Ethereum, and then you can use the exchange to trade to dollars or bitcoins if you would like without needing to do on-chain bitcoin transactions.