Status as of Sunday, February 18, 2018

Good afternoon!

• I'm pleased to announce that SHA-256 and equihash mining are both feature-complete and have entered final testing. We will release equihash first. SHA-256, which is working, will have to wait until the enterprise-class Internet connection is finally installed. The backend is ready to go, but Constance still has to make changes to the website, like displaying hashrate as solrate where applicable. If I had to estimate now, we will probably be ready to go with equihash mining on Sunday.
• There will be a release today to issue a number of bugfixes, and to enable our new polls. Other enhancements include a request by a customer to change the name of two-factor authentication codes, the resolution of some confusion with live balances, and a change that clarifies how merge-mined blocks are credited for solo miners.
• I am looking for comment on how to handle payout issues that are reported on the forums. While we appreciate customer feedback, there are a lot of times when customers register a forum account and post "my payout didn't get processed" in the chat with no further information. The answer is to submit a support ticket, because we can't be of any assistance without more data, and also because we don't want to discuss people's finances in a public forum. Comments on how we can strike a balance between turning customers off and making sure that the chat remains engaging and on-topic?
• In what seems like a common theme recently, I'm going to add another forum rule to the top of the forums. Please be sure to limit your contributions to the forums to those that add value to the discussion. Posts that consist of just a word or two and which are not relevant to the discussion will be deleted beginning now.
• Chris has expanded the payout coins list by about 70, all of which are already enabled. Feel free to check out the new offerings!
• Upon customer request, I lowered the minimum worker difficulties for scrypt. The static difficulty minimum is now 16384, and the dynamic difficulty will fall as low as 8192.

Sunday 2/19 or 2/25?

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good afternoon!

• I'm pleased to announce that SHA-256 and equihash mining are both feature-complete and have entered final testing. We will release equihash first. SHA-256, which is working, will have to wait until the enterprise-class Internet connection is finally installed. The backend is ready to go, but Constance still has to make changes to the website, like displaying hashrate as solrate where applicable. If I had to estimate now, we will probably be ready to go with equihash mining on Sunday.
• There will be a release today to issue a number of bugfixes, and to enable our new polls. Other enhancements include a request by a customer to change the name of two-factor authentication codes, the resolution of some confusion with live balances, and a change that clarifies how merge-mined blocks are credited for solo miners.
• I am looking for comment on how to handle payout issues that are reported on the forums. While we appreciate customer feedback, there are a lot of times when customers register a forum account and post "my payout didn't get processed" in the chat with no further information. The answer is to submit a support ticket, because we can't be of any assistance without more data, and also because we don't want to discuss people's finances in a public forum. Comments on how we can strike a balance between turning customers off and making sure that the chat remains engaging and on-topic?
• In what seems like a common theme recently, I'm going to add another forum rule to the top of the forums. Please be sure to limit your contributions to the forums to those that add value to the discussion. Posts that consist of just a word or two and which are not relevant to the discussion will be deleted beginning now.
• Chris has expanded the payout coins list by about 70, all of which are already enabled. Feel free to check out the new offerings!
• Upon customer request, I lowered the minimum worker difficulties for scrypt. The static difficulty minimum is now 16384, and the dynamic difficulty will fall as low as 8192.

Will BTG come with Equihash?

In regards to reports of issues via chat -- Maybe a dumb chat bot that responds to keywords such as "payout" indicating periodically if that word is mentioned in the chat that people should open support request along with providing info on how to do it. Obviously you don't want it to reply every time someone says payout but maybe once every 15 mins if someone says payout in chat?

A suggestion as I'm pretty sure one of my posts was deleted the other day: A forum private message when this happens that indicates why the chat was deleted. I thought my comments added value but I guess it was decided they weren't.

Eyedol-X wrote:

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good afternoon!

• I'm pleased to announce that SHA-256 and equihash mining are both feature-complete and have entered final testing. We will release equihash first. SHA-256, which is working, will have to wait until the enterprise-class Internet connection is finally installed. The backend is ready to go, but Constance still has to make changes to the website, like displaying hashrate as solrate where applicable. If I had to estimate now, we will probably be ready to go with equihash mining on Sunday.
• There will be a release today to issue a number of bugfixes, and to enable our new polls. Other enhancements include a request by a customer to change the name of two-factor authentication codes, the resolution of some confusion with live balances, and a change that clarifies how merge-mined blocks are credited for solo miners.
• I am looking for comment on how to handle payout issues that are reported on the forums. While we appreciate customer feedback, there are a lot of times when customers register a forum account and post "my payout didn't get processed" in the chat with no further information. The answer is to submit a support ticket, because we can't be of any assistance without more data, and also because we don't want to discuss people's finances in a public forum. Comments on how we can strike a balance between turning customers off and making sure that the chat remains engaging and on-topic?
• In what seems like a common theme recently, I'm going to add another forum rule to the top of the forums. Please be sure to limit your contributions to the forums to those that add value to the discussion. Posts that consist of just a word or two and which are not relevant to the discussion will be deleted beginning now.
• Chris has expanded the payout coins list by about 70, all of which are already enabled. Feel free to check out the new offerings!
• Upon customer request, I lowered the minimum worker difficulties for scrypt. The static difficulty minimum is now 16384, and the dynamic difficulty will fall as low as 8192.

Will BTG come with Equihash?

In regards to reports of issues via chat -- Maybe a dumb chat bot that responds to keywords such as "payout" indicating periodically if that word is mentioned in the chat that people should open support request along with providing info on how to do it. Obviously you don't want it to reply every time someone says payout but maybe once every 15 mins if someone says payout in chat?

A suggestion as I'm pretty sure one of my posts was deleted the other day: A forum private message when this happens that indicates why the chat was deleted. I thought my comments added value but I guess it was decided they weren't.

I'm not aware of a reason why one of your posts would be deleted. Please let me know if it happens again and I"ll look into it.

Yes, we plan to mine bitcoin gold, but we can't get its testnet working, so we will start with zcash and zclassic if we can't mine it before the weekend. Bitcoin Gold has a different block format than the other equihash coins.

Meanwhile, bitcoin gold is already available for payout. We will be crediting users' balances for those who were owed Bitcoin Gold in November shortly.

Steve Sokolowski wrote: I'm not aware of a reason why one of your posts would be deleted. Please let me know if it happens again and I"ll look into it.

Yes, we plan to mine bitcoin gold, but we can't get its testnet working, so we will start with zcash and zclassic if we can't mine it before the weekend. Bitcoin Gold has a different block format than the other equihash coins.

Meanwhile, bitcoin gold is already available for payout. We will be crediting users' balances for those who were owed Bitcoin Gold in November shortly.

If you need some outside testing, I have some equihash rigs I'd be willing to point your way -- I have both AMD and Nvidia rigs

On the topic of BTG, I thought I had read somewhere that it was now enabled and I just went to check again I'm not seeing it as an option, am I missing something?
[Archived image unavailable: https://s5.postimg.org/fvhle184z/Coins.jpg]

Good job ! ...Thank you Steve and Chris ...

Will Komodo be added to the list of payouts?

Any incentive to be an earlier adopter of the SHA256 pool? i mean in my instance I have 2 L3+'s on pro-hashing and I'm happy with them here (even if pool fees are that much higher - the benefits justify them for me)

On SHA256 I'm really not sure that there are enough coins on it to justify 5% fees when I currently pay 0.99% and tbh am happy with my pool. And there's always inherent risk in being an early adopter.

Basically what I'm saying is I'm happy with both my pools would you consider incentivising people to become early adopters? Mereged mining on a new server @ 4.99% won't be enough for me to move my S9's I'm afraid

elliott500 wrote:Any incentive to be an earlier adopter of the SHA256 pool? i mean in my instance I have 2 L3+'s on pro-hashing and I'm happy with them here (even if pool fees are that much higher - the benefits justify them for me)

On SHA256 I'm really not sure that there are enough coins on it to justify 5% fees when I currently pay 0.99% and tbh am happy with my pool. And there's always inherent risk in being an early adopter.

Basically what I'm saying is I'm happy with both my pools would you consider incentivising people to become early adopters? Mereged mining on a new server @ 4.99% won't be enough for me to move my S9's I'm afraid

We're still evaluating whether we need to add a "per-algorithm fee" feature. Most likely, we'll launch with the current fee and see whether the profitability exceeds straight bitcoin cash mining. It isn't true that there are few SHA-256 coins; there are actually over 100 of them. But the coins, for whatever reason, seem to have a much lesser profitability edge than the other algorithms.

If we find that we can earn more than straight bitcoin cash, then we'll leave the fee as-is. If not, we'll target 1-2% below the largest pools. You might recall how we've always said that we try to compete on quality while still being competitive with payouts. Remember, we will be offering payouts from day one as PPS, while other pools wait for blocks to pay out rounds, and any pool that isn't filling out the 1099 forms is taking a serious risk with your money. If you want to eek out that last 1%, then we'll be honest and say you should go elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it's really difficult to say at this point what the profitability will be because there isn't really a way to test without having a lot of miners. The other reason is that the miners themselves make coins more difficult, so even if we ran a simulation, the profitability will be lower in the real world once our miners raise the difficulty of the coins nobody else is mining.