Status as of Saturday, March 26

Here's a brief update of today's status:

• Yesterday, we were featured on The Daily Decrypt at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9mE7g_lCM. If you're interested in finding out how the pool works behind the scenes, be sure to watch!
• We are taking a pause on new features and focusing on improving stability. The mining server seems to be in good shape, so we're fixing a few problems with the website. For one, the live profitability chart was taking a while to display its data, so we fixed that issue.
• There were also some issues with the block explorers that caused them to have inordinately long load times - those were fixed earlier this morning. Paging issues with addresses on the explorers remain, but they should be fixed as soon as Chris issues a website release this afternoon.
• We're going to make a decision soon about what to do with Poolpicker. One of the ideas that I'm talking with Chris about is the creation of a more accurate Poolpicker as part of this site. This "more accurate" site would randomly test pools through actual mining. The same miner would be used to test each pool for an hour, and then the actual amount received would be reported (not what the pool reports, and not what the pool says it owes before paying it out). This idea would eliminate several of Poolpicker's problems: unwillingness to define the timezone for reporting, not defining whether fees are included, and so on. Please offer comments on this idea.

Happy mining!

I love the idea of an alternate poolpicker. I've always been a little bit frustrated by how inconsistent it seems to be, and how obvious reporting errors don't get removed from their charts. If your other work here is any indication, then your system here would be vastly more accurate, open, and consistent. If you can get your hands on some old gridseed 5-chip miners (or any small usb scrypt miner), and point one each at the various pools 24/7, that would be ideal. I think that randomizing the time of day a given pool is tested will cause the results to become more accurate over time, but I'm not sure it would be really useful for daily comparisons due to hourly (minute-ly?) profitability fluctuations being so significant. Of course, that only makes sense if you've got a bunch of them laying around, since they're going for 20-30 bucks a pop nowadays, and that'd be too much to spend on a cool new feature that wouldn't directly increase profitability. Although, I've got 3 or 4 of them laying around I'd be willing to donate to the endeavor, if you like. (I'm just not interested in bothering to do the work of selling them)

Let me talk to Chris about this and I'll get back to you. Even if we got the miners for free, there would still be a lot of time required to program and maintain this system.

The idea would only work if we had enough identical miners to mine at every pool at the same time. Otherwise, we could just happen to pick one pool when there was a profitable coin that every pool was mining.

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Here's a brief update of today's status:

• We're going to make a decision soon about what to do with Poolpicker.

Happy mining!

They made the decision for you.........they removed Prohashing.

Thanks for pointing that out. After you said this, I went over there and couldn't seem to find any reason why - all traces of the site were just gone. We hadn't asked them to delete us.

I'm not going to contact them because we've come to the conclusion that their service is not accurate anyway. I'll remove their feed from the website in the next update.

"One of the ideas that I'm talking with Chris about is the creation of a more accurate Poolpicker as part of this site."

Great idea!


"Yesterday, we were featured on The Daily Decrypt at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b9mE7g_lCM. If you're interested in finding out how the pool works behind the scenes, be sure to watch!"

Thanks! Very good interview!

I didn't realize there was so much demand for the Poolpicker idea. Are there any other users who would be interested in that? Is it generally common knowledge that Poolpicker is inaccurate, or was I the first person to reveal that?