Status as of Thursday, December 28, 2017

Good morning!

• The release that will be occurring this afternoon is intended to improve the "live worker status" issues that some customers are experiencing. We'll also be making some changes to correct the display of hashrates in the forums. We'd also like to get the corrections in for the "expected profitability" chart, which you might recall has the "LTC" line listed too high (the line is for a pool with no orphans and no fees, which doesn't exist.)
• Chris signed a contract with Comcast Enterprise to replace the Verizon and Javapipe setup we have now. They will conduct installation in February. This $3275/month service will provided a dedicated fiber line that will guarantee us bandwidth at the expense of all the other buildings in the complex if necessary, and will have a real person available 24 hours a day to talk to on the phone to respond to DDoS attacks within 15 minutes. We expect this service to improve profitability by as much as 1%, because we should be able to reduce ping times by 30ms during times when no attacks are occurring. Currently, traffic is routed through Javapipe and a complex VPN setup at all times, increasing ping times and orphan rates and stale shares.
• The other benefit of this service is its simplicity. Chris will be able to take offline and reclaim several servers that had been dedicated to OpenVPN traffic. Without all these routers, troubleshooting can proceed without having to consider whether the network setup is at fault, a huge timesaver. We expect the weird connectivity issues to be reduced as well. When we start SHA-256 mining, we will increase the bandwidth to 1Gbps, so that we can get simultaneous bitcoin block uploads to 110 peers within 1s.
• Finally obtaining the 1850 litecoins from Poloniex allowed us to sell them and put $200,000 in a bank account to guarantee a developer's salary and benefits for a year. We'll begin a search for an additional developer after the holidays - in addition to the student who will be hired to answer the basic support tickets between classes. We may post that position here. The litecoins, which were worth $3, were considered noise earlier in the year and it was a good thing they weren't automatically sold back then.
• For the past three days, we've now been getting the tickets down to zero every day. Our next goal is to get the initial ticket response time down to a few hours, rather than 24 hours.
• On Sunday, January 7, 2018, we will be taking all services offline for a brief period of time to upgrade our database to Postgres 10 for improved performance. More details about this outage will be communicated a few days from now.

This is great news!

What kind of developer are you looking to hire soon? I'm a full stack JavaScript/Angular2/C#/.NET/SQL developer, but like any inspired dev, I'm always looking to learn other languages and technologies including blockchain development. Just throwing that out there as a miner myself, enjoy using your mining pool and would love to contribute.

cashflowminer wrote:What kind of developer are you looking to hire soon? I'm a full stack JavaScript/Angular2/C#/.NET/SQL developer, but like any inspired dev, I'm always looking to learn other languages and technologies including blockchain development. Just throwing that out there as a miner myself, enjoy using your mining pool and would love to contribute.

No web development will be required. We'll probably be looking for someone to perform backend work. That would include installing and discontinuing coins, determining why coins don't pay out, modifying source code of coins for our system, troubleshooting network issues, managing virtual machines and servers, and monitoring things like orphan rates and slippage.

Our goal is to get someone to do this, someone to do support tickets, and someone to do management/business/accounting, so that we can change our focus to development and moving forward with new features.

Thanks for the response Steve....have you ever been approached by any VC firms or investment companies that are able to acquire your company so you can have the appropriate funding capital for hiring the right talent, expanding the business and getting an edge over your other mining pool competitors?

My name is Lenny Castaneda with Investor Town Hall, a San Diego-based media company that covers capital markets, equity crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyjcastaneda/) and would love to explore this with you as I love your platform and know a huge investment company that could help while you still maintain complete control and they provide the capital needed for ProHashing seriously dominate this space and be the undisputed mining pool leader, providing the best customer/user experience for the miners using these pools --like myself....if that is even of interest to you...let me know, we have big thing happening in 2018 such as having this group investing $4-$5million toward adding 500 total L3+ & 500 total S9 mining machines to your pool once we get a deal solidified in a couple weeks....and our only variable is the mining pool that we are not sure how profitable having these machines will be, so would like to develop a working relationship with you to see how we all can grow together.

Here is my contact info:
lenny@investortownhall.com
cell: 714-414-5823
office: 858-381-4622

cashflowminer wrote:Thanks for the response Steve....have you ever been approached by any VC firms or investment companies that are able to acquire your company so you can have the appropriate funding capital for hiring the right talent, expanding the business and getting an edge over your other mining pool competitors?

My name is Lenny Castaneda with Investor Town Hall, a San Diego-based media company that covers capital markets, equity crowdfunding and cryptocurrencies (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyjcastaneda/) and would love to explore this with you as I love your platform and know a huge investment company that could help while you still maintain complete control and they provide the capital needed for ProHashing seriously dominate this space and be the undisputed mining pool leader, providing the best customer/user experience for the miners using these pools --like myself....if that is even of interest to you...let me know, we have big thing happening in 2018 such as having this group investing $4-$5million toward adding 500 total L3+ & 500 total S9 mining machines to your pool once we get a deal solidified in a couple weeks....and our only variable is the mining pool that we are not sure how profitable having these machines will be, so would like to develop a working relationship with you to see how we all can grow together.

Here is my contact info:
lenny@investortownhall.com
cell: 714-414-5823
office: 858-381-4622

Hi Lenny,

Thanks for the idea. We'd love to help you out with mining for your machines and can provide whatever level of customer support you need.

On the issue of financing, we have plenty of money. Since we aren't limited by funds, we want to maintain 100% of the business, and thank you for your offer. The limitation we face now is being able to hire people while still being able to maintain the current level of service during the training period. Since there are only a few employees right now, there is a limit to the speed at which people can be trained - a problem that the GDAX and Bittrex face and why they closed their sites to new customers. Unfortunately, no amount of money can assist with that issue.

Thanks again!

haha good problems to have Steve. That's awesome.

So then my last question is my funding source of investors are going to want me to make sure I have a solid pool to put these S9s and L3+ machines to work, if we have 500 total for each of these machines... does that increase our profitability by having more machines associated with the same ProHashing account?

Currently right now, I have a beta test for a L3+ and that is been generating about $15/day -$25/day of revenue on average for one machine, is we have more does this change the daily income or increase our priority when it comes to the resource usage?

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good morning!

• The release that will be occurring this afternoon is intended to improve the "live worker status" issues that some customers are experiencing. We'll also be making some changes to correct the display of hashrates in the forums. We'd also like to get the corrections in for the "expected profitability" chart, which you might recall has the "LTC" line listed too high (the line is for a pool with no orphans and no fees, which doesn't exist.)

How is the "LTC" line listed too high?
Doesn't LiteCoinPool offer the "LTC" line as it is on the chart without any modifications needed?
https://www.litecoinpool.org/help#faq

Is there a pool fee?
No, even the nominal PPS fee was removed when merged mining was introduced. In fact, the “fee” is now negative: the PPS ratio is currently 101%, meaning that miners earn 1% more than with a 0-fee PPS system.

What is the PPS ratio?
Short answer: the higher the PPS ratio, the more you earn.
Long answer: a PPS ratio of 1 (or 100%) corresponds to the expected earnings of a Litecoin solo miner in an ideal world, without taking into account aspects such as orphaned blocks. (In practice, a Litecoin solo miner will always achieve a slightly lower ratio in the long run.) We say “expected” earnings because mining is a stochastic (random) process, and it is therefore impossible to know beforehand exactly how much a miner will earn in a given lapse of time.
Thanks to merged mining, a technique that allows multiple cryptocurrencies to be mined simultaneously, it is possible to achieve PPS ratios higher than 100%. This is unrelated to what “profit-switching” pools do, as in merged mining all chains are mined at the same time. For this reason, merged mining does not cause sudden difficulty spikes and does not harm any of the involved networks.

AppleMiner wrote:

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good morning!

• The release that will be occurring this afternoon is intended to improve the "live worker status" issues that some customers are experiencing. We'll also be making some changes to correct the display of hashrates in the forums. We'd also like to get the corrections in for the "expected profitability" chart, which you might recall has the "LTC" line listed too high (the line is for a pool with no orphans and no fees, which doesn't exist.)

How is the "LTC" line listed too high?
Doesn't LiteCoinPool offer the "LTC" line as it is on the chart without any modifications needed?
https://www.litecoinpool.org/help#faq

Is there a pool fee?
No, even the nominal PPS fee was removed when merged mining was introduced. In fact, the “fee” is now negative: the PPS ratio is currently 101%, meaning that miners earn 1% more than with a 0-fee PPS system.

What is the PPS ratio?
Short answer: the higher the PPS ratio, the more you earn.
Long answer: a PPS ratio of 1 (or 100%) corresponds to the expected earnings of a Litecoin solo miner in an ideal world, without taking into account aspects such as orphaned blocks. (In practice, a Litecoin solo miner will always achieve a slightly lower ratio in the long run.) We say “expected” earnings because mining is a stochastic (random) process, and it is therefore impossible to know beforehand exactly how much a miner will earn in a given lapse of time.
Thanks to merged mining, a technique that allows multiple cryptocurrencies to be mined simultaneously, it is possible to achieve PPS ratios higher than 100%. This is unrelated to what “profit-switching” pools do, as in merged mining all chains are mined at the same time. For this reason, merged mining does not cause sudden difficulty spikes and does not harm any of the involved networks.

From this text, it sounds as if litecoinpool is offering the same line as we are - but the line isn't achievable, and they even acknowledge that in their explanation. The problem with that chart is that it makes it look as if we are much less profitable than litecoins, when in reality nobody can achieve the "LTC" line.

They say 100% would be PPS in an IDEAL(one where orphans do not exist) world.
And they are offering 101%.....they keep the merged mining and payout OVER what IDEAL(a world in which no orphans exist)

They seem to acknowledge that a SOLO miner will always achieve less, but I cannot find where they acknowledge the line isnt reachable by those on the pool in PPS mode.

The problem I see with the POOL's profit LTC line is its not a LTC line, its a scrypt line.
The chart is comparing how much LTC people made vs how much the pool's scrypt people made.
If the chart was how much PH pool's scrpyt miners made paid out in LTC...then it would be a LTC line and could be compared.

As long as its an average of what the scrpyt people were paid out, regardless of their coin payout, then its not tracking LTC its tracking verge prices, and BTC prices, and every other coin the scrpyt people are being paid out in. The web page needs an expected coin payout by coins and algos.
It needs to show...minging on x11 how much the average payout was for people who picked LTC that day...or People who picked DASH, or while mining scrypt how much they would have gotten on verge during the day, or on BTC if they choose that. As it is now its just an average and all the payout coins all lumped together. When BTC rises...that half of the users picking it as their payout coin see a payout OVER 1MH expected, while those with a coin that went down show a value UNDER 1MH expected. Its just an average so they line doesn't tell that much to begin with. It needs to be separated out to hold any values worth comparing.