Status as of Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Good morning!

• We've temporarily disabled two algorithms - CryptonightV1 and Equihash <144,5> - pending some changes. CryptonightV1 has an error getting the correct block rewards from the daemons. To figure out what the cause of the issue is, we need to install CryptonightV1 coins on the development environment, and we are encountering difficulties doing so. With equihash<144, 5>, we learned this morning from a customer that the "personalization" string is different for every coin in the algorithm, so our implementation will lose some blocks. We'll need to perform more research on whether and how it is possible to switch between the personalization strings, and implement the changes. This fix should be easier than the CryptonightV1 fixes.
• Cardano payouts are currently stopped because we have not been able to get the daemon to pay customers. The daemon returns an error message that we don't have enough money, but it's clear that we do have enough money in our wallets when we review a block explorer. Manual payouts are also successful. Unfortunately, after three days of debugging, we have run out of ideas about how to troubleshoot. Vance contacted the Cardano developers and is awaiting a response. We'll make a decision about how to proceed, and whether Cardano will need to be discontinued because we can't figure out the problem, after they respond.
• An erroneous payout on Sunday resulted in some negative balances, most of which have already been earned back by customers. More information on that is available in the "news" forum.
• From March 5 to 7, we're having a company-wide meeting to discuss plans for the next year. We plan to spend the week discussing what features we should be focusing on, what the outlook is for the cryptocurrency industry, and similar topics. One of the issues we plan to focus on is why the number of workers connected to the pool keeps declining, particularly for SHA-256 workers, despite the system being more stable and having more features than it did when prices were lowest. If you have any thoughts on the lower number of workers issue, feel free to respond in this thread.

I am curious if you and your team will discuss/consider broadening your business model to include PoS staking pools. In watching this for a while, I see a shift from PoW to PoS, and I feel the world needs honest businesses to run staking pools. In particular for EOS, TRON, Either as it shifts, and Cardano (soon). I think this broadens your user base, since HODLers will still have stake and want it providing return no matter what the base coin price is, while some of us miners have to turn off when the price becomes lower than the electricity. In broadening your base, I think it might provide some business stability in a bear markets, yet the underlying skill sets - running servers with internet connectivity - remains the same. Also, staking will not run afoul due to external influences - like companies flooding the market with ASIC based miners increasing the difficulty disproportionally to the coin price. Might add stability.

What I have struggled with, is how do you distinguish yourself from the other staking pools? Clearly you can't automatically select the highest performing staking, yet you could still provide payout in any coin like you do here. I think that might make you very attractive to HODLers, particularly with your new "portfolio method".

Thanks for your consideration, and good luck with your company meeting.

there is an -pers auto option you can use?? and dang!! i just got a message from miningrigrentals stating that i can now rent the 100k equihash 144.5 and use it on your site .. i had issues on almost every time I rent an equihash 144,5 and they finally listen to me!!!

ajs wrote:I am curious if you and your team will discuss/consider broadening your business model to include PoS staking pools.

The 2 issues I would see with that....1) the pool doesnt want to be a BANK and have coins for customers stored on it, thereby making it a hackable target. 2) they might require a money transaction license to be able to accept coins being deposited.

CSZiggy wrote:

ajs wrote:I am curious if you and your team will discuss/consider broadening your business model to include PoS staking pools.

The 2 issues I would see with that....1) the pool doesnt want to be a BANK and have coins for customers stored on it, thereby making it a hackable target. 2) they might require a money transaction license to be able to accept coins being deposited.

Staking does NOT require a transfer or banking of coins. Built into PoS systems is the concept of freezing and delegating the voting stake of a coin. The owner still hold the coin and it’s keys, they simply freeze the coin, and delegate to a pool for voting.

CSZiggy wrote:

ajs wrote:I am curious if you and your team will discuss/consider broadening your business model to include PoS staking pools.

The 2 issues I would see with that....1) the pool doesnt want to be a BANK and have coins for customers stored on it, thereby making it a hackable target. 2) they might require a money transaction license to be able to accept coins being deposited.

This money transmission license thing is the problem.

Money transmission is defined as receiving money from one person and sending it to a different person. In the case of a staking pool, it seems to me that if the money goes back to the same wallet, then the business isn't a money transmitter.

But there are lots of staking pools that do that, so I'm not sure how we would be able to compete against them. The real service that there is a demand for is being able to receive payouts in a different coin than the one that is staked.

As to the coins moving towards proof of stake, it is true that some coins are proof of stake, but the largest coins are proof of work and have no intention of changing. The vast majority of money to be main looks likely to be proof of work for the foreseeable future.

" One of the issues we plan to focus on is why the number of workers connected to the pool keeps declining, particularly for SHA-256 workers, despite the system being more stable and having more features than it did when prices were lowest. If you have any thoughts on the lower number of workers issue, feel free to respond in this thread."

IMHO, it's because the number of coins that are available in SHA256 is the lowest I have ever seen here, but what IS in the list is even more telling. There are coins that have very high value/difficulty/market cap, and coins with impossibly low value/difficulty/market cap. Where are the coins in the middle? A lot of small scale and medium scale miners can't find any food to eat.

As for PoS, please don't. PoS is an INVESTOR mechanism. Mining is not. They are two separate things, two separate business models, and on balance have no practical application for profit miners. I buy hardware, I run it until it dies, and then buy more. I hold no coins. I am not an investor. If you do take this route, please start another site.

Steve Sokolowski wrote:One of the issues we plan to focus on is why the number of workers connected to the pool keeps declining, particularly for SHA-256 workers, despite the system being more stable and having more features than it did when prices were lowest. If you have any thoughts on the lower number of workers issue, feel free to respond in this thread.

Could the pool alter the main front page or make a dropdown for the "Number of Miners" and show those results by algo.
Might be nice to see how many miners across the week are on the algos I mine and be able to see trends on other algos I am able to mine on instead of being lumped into just 1 group of just MINERS.

For myself, I feel we are in the middle of a crypto-nuclear winter. I see it taking the next 18-months to 2-years for the dust to settle for the coins to pop back up and become profitable again. I personally have no desire to mine at a negative return during all that time in between, especially when instead of paying for electricity I could just BUY the coins and get 40-50% more coins to hold. I am not currently buying coins and my mining is at a minimal as I am not sure even in 2 years if the value would return for me to even break even.

CSZiggy wrote:

Steve Sokolowski wrote:One of the issues we plan to focus on is why the number of workers connected to the pool keeps declining, particularly for SHA-256 workers, despite the system being more stable and having more features than it did when prices were lowest. If you have any thoughts on the lower number of workers issue, feel free to respond in this thread.

Could the pool alter the main front page or make a dropdown for the "Number of Miners" and show those results by algo.
Might be nice to see how many miners across the week are on the algos I mine and be able to see trends on other algos I am able to mine on instead of being lumped into just 1 group of just MINERS.

For myself, I feel we are in the middle of a crypto-nuclear winter. I see it taking the next 18-months to 2-years for the dust to settle for the coins to pop back up and become profitable again. I personally have no desire to mine at a negative return during all that time in between, especially when instead of paying for electricity I could just BUY the coins and get 40-50% more coins to hold. I am not currently buying coins and my mining is at a minimal as I am not sure even in 2 years if the value would return for me to even break even.

While we don't have a chart yet for the number of miners per algorithm, the number of miners in all algorithms except SHA-256 has slightly increased since last month. For SHA-256, hashrate and number of miners declined 25%, despite DigiBytes being more comparably profitable than they were last month.

I've been doing one of those experiments, like we did with scrypt a few months back, of increasing SHA-256 profitability by 2% without making a big deal about it. The first full day of that increased profitability is today. If the problem is profitability, then we would expect hashrate to increase while this experiment is ongoing.

Is there any way to tell if the decrease in SHA-256 was from people who own their own miners or from a decrease in hashrates sent from nicehash?

Maybe just 1 or 2 people that used to mine here stopped or moved to another pool and took the nicehash hashrate with them?