Status as of Friday, February 23, 2018

Good morning!

• We're still on for a Sunday release. Bitcoin Gold creator h4x3rotab was able to create a testnet node for us, so Bitcoin Gold might or might not be included in the release. All services will be offline for about 10 minutes, and then we will slowly enable to new features throughout the rest of the day and the next day.
• There are a few customers who were discussing coin selection and why the pool doesn't assign a lot of hashrate towards very profitable coins. In most cases, that's because the difficulty of the coin is very low. If we assign more hashrate to these coins, we would find blocks every second or even more often, leading to everyone's miners having constant work restarts and earning no profit. It may appear as if static coin miners are earning more mining these coins. They may be, but they wouldn't be mining them if their miners couldn't handle the work restarts. If we aren't assigning dynamic miners to the coin, it's almost certainly because the work restarts would cause more money to be lost than can be gained by the increased profitability.
• I'm going to ask Chris to close the poll a day or two early, because there are already enough votes to provide a statistically significant result. We'll be asking followup questions on the poll. It's interesting to me that many customers answered that they could earn more money at another pool, given that we asked them to only consider earnings after February 10. Optimizations we made were able to increase relative profits by over 5% between the start of the year and February 10, but even that isn't enough, apparently. The next question will try to correlate type of miner to pool profit differences, so that we can learn if there is a specific miner type that has the most problems. Perhaps there is one type of miner that is significantly affected by something we're doing, and which explains why the 5% increase doesn't seem to have reduced this category of complaints.
• Chris did some more work on network connectivity issues. One problem he found was that nightly backups were saturating the bandwidth of the database server, so he capped the bandwidth of the backups so that there is a continual stream throughout the day.
• There were a few requests for Litecoin Cash. We added Litecoin Cash, and it is in the process of getting its blocks. We expect about 3-5 days for it to download the blockchain.

SInce you mentioned LCC what about XRP? I would love to get paid in XRP for a bit while its cheap since I was the bag holder and bought some at $2.60ish when everyone thought it was going to be on coinbase and would like to get my Avg cost lower.

mclarney2535 wrote:SInce you mentioned LCC what about XRP? I would love to get paid in XRP for a bit while its cheap since I was the bag holder and bought some at $2.60ish when everyone thought it was going to be on coinbase and would like to get my Avg cost lower.

That coin has a different API than the others. It will be one of the tasks that will be assigned to the new coins and trader developer when he starts. Expect Ripple to be available around May or June.

Cool thx Steve

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good morning!

• I'm going to ask Chris to close the poll a day or two early, because there are already enough votes to provide a statistically significant result. We'll be asking followup questions on the poll. It's interesting to me that many customers answered that they could earn more money at another pool, given that we asked them to only consider earnings after February 10.

My backup pool has consistently delivered over 0.00000200 every one of the past 10 days and yesterday 0.00000223 and Feb 16th 0.00000342. PH has barely past 0.00000200 on about 1/2 of those days. correct me if I am wrong but I believe that is before you take your 5%. From a customer standpoint it appears you are ending the poll early because it is bad publicity.

travelinmusic wrote:

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good morning!
correct me if I am wrong but I believe that is before you take your 5%. From a customer standpoint it appears you are ending the poll early because it is bad publicity.

since there is no ongoing display of the poll question results, how does the poll termination time affect 'publicity' one way or the other?

he didnt have to tell us what he observed, he could have simply said he "got enough results" and left it at that.

baseless paranoia and accusations only serves to reduce available information, not improve it.

now, one question he did not have on the poll, is the reason why i use litecoinpool able to get reliable payouts more than once a day.
(i pay myself in increments of 0.04 ltc and get it five minutes after the next hour i exceed that amount)
this gives me liquidity in a fast moving volatile world.

dnprod wrote:

travelinmusic wrote:

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Good morning!
correct me if I am wrong but I believe that is before you take your 5%. From a customer standpoint it appears you are ending the poll early because it is bad publicity.

since there is no ongoing display of the poll question results, how does the poll termination time affect 'publicity' one way or the other?

he didnt have to tell us what he observed, he could have simply said he "got enough results" and left it at that.

baseless paranoia and accusations only serves to reduce available information, not improve it.

now, one question he did not have on the poll, is the reason why i use litecoinpool able to get reliable payouts more than once a day.
(i pay myself in increments of 0.04 ltc and get it five minutes after the next hour i exceed that amount)
this gives me liquidity in a fast moving volatile world.

There IS an ongoing display of the poll question results!!! (after you vote) :S , hahah how can YOU can make BASELESS coments omg,

A funny thing about the pool is that was asking what deterred you from using Prohashing, but you the botrs are proporcinal to the earnings, so of you where actully deterred to use PH you will be able to vote, the person who made the poll, or is stupid or very clever

Unfortunately, I don't think that payouts more than once a day is desired by enough customers to justify implementing it over some of the other features we could implement, like other algorithms and figuring out what's wrong with this profitability issue. But I could be wrong, and invite customers to say so if I am.

Poll results for previous polls will remain visible indefinitely, so closing a poll early does not hide its results. I think that concern is overblown.

I can see that it's possible that people could make a few percentage points more due to whatever is causing this problem, but 342 satoshis on February 16? We reported 216 for that day. That's a difference of almost 33%. Which pool delivered 342? Once you tell me, then I can look at the pool. I just had an idea that maybe they are mining coins only available at an exchange that we don't yet have support for, and if so, then we can resolve the issue by adding that exchange.

The comment about the meaning of the poll is correct. The poll doesn't prove that increasing profitability will draw in more customers; those customers are not voting. Profitability compared to litecoin has increased by 5% since January and there has not been a huge influx of customers. Instead, it proves that existing miners are willing to pay slightly more for other advantages we offer. Of course, we can still improve profitability to satisfy those customers as well, and we plan to do that once we get more information.

rulovico wrote:

dnprod wrote:

travelinmusic wrote:

There IS an ongoing display of the poll question results!!! (after you vote) :S , hahah how can YOU can make BASELESS coments omg,

well, ., those who voted probably wont be affected by 'publicity', their opinions are probably already well-formed

those vast majority of us who did not vote (no relevant question/answer in this particular poll) do not see results and
our opinions are not swayed one way or another. there is no publicity value either way in this poll as far as i'm concerned.

although this situation could raise a minor issue, will some of us be motivated to do 'unecessary' voting, just so we can see the results?
hmmmmm.....

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Unfortunately, I don't think that payouts more than once a day is desired by enough customers to justify implementing it over some of the other features we could implement, like other algorithms and figuring out what's wrong with this profitability issue. But I could be wrong, and invite customers to say so if I am.

that's what polls are for! lmao...

now i realize running payouts for all those obscure altcoins more than once a blue moon, er, day, is a lot of overhead and opportunity for issues to arise. litecoinpool obviously does not have to deal with altcoins and exchanges.
but perhaps just for LTC itself you may consider 2 or 3 times a day sometime down the road.