System offline

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Steve Sokolowski
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Re: System offline

Post by Steve Sokolowski » Wed Sep 27, 2017 12:15 pm

DuncanBoaz wrote:All of this instability seems to come from the simple growing pains of the expanding Crypto Market. Xichas is correct. There are more machines then ever and it's only going to keep growing. That's Moore's Law.

What started as a hobby and a pipedream for many has become a profession and lifestyle. Cryptoland is no longer some small Niche. The world has noticed. When entire countries start talking about Digitizing their Fiat Currencies, changing economic laws, and trying to ban systems that threaten previous systems....A whole different prospective has to be taken.

ProHashing is a massive hub. The "workers" from 2 years ago pale in comparison to today. Delegating tasks beyond the reach of 2 people could significantly improve stability for the site and quality of product for all parties involved.

Screw this Switching to NH or "Fingers crossed you guys get stable" kind of comments.

What can we all do to help? How can we effectively tackle system problems? How many of us have AMPLE free time because we generate streams of income purely from placing orders on exchanges and running computers?

If a few of us work with the Brother's instead of chatting about how they could do things differently, we want to leave, and they "owe" us for our own security flaws it could all be better. It's pretty fantastic already.
Thanks for the offer, but there really isn't anything you can do to help at this point. We already know what needs to be done and have identified people to do it. We are just waiting for the lawyer to see whether the business can be profitable or not.

As you said, things have grown lately, but the competition has not changed. Mining is still an industry where there are a lot of anonymous people who aren't paying taxes (because they would have to reveal who they were if they did pay.) We pay 52% in taxes and even more to fill out paperwork and come up with numbers for those tax forms. That essentially means that we need to be 3 times as profitable as these competitors to remain afloat. If we could be guaranteed a level playing field, the situation would change dramatically. I wrote a FAQ about the issues being considered; you might want to check it out.

Earning an equivalent salary isn't enough. We can't take the huge risks of accidentally violating a law and losing our life savings to fines, being susceptible to a bitcoin crash, or have Republicans eliminate the preexisting conditions clause, unless we can make many times more money than we do now at "normal" jobs. Imagine if Republicans succeed someday and I end up paying $3000/month in health costs instead of paying $600/month to an employer for insurance. "Normal" jobs provide guaranteed health benefits regardless of what Trump does, and I already have a dream job. The purpose of the lawyer's evaluation is to make sure that, after all regulations are complied with, our potential profits would justify these huge drawbacks of expanding.

Once the lawyer finishes his evaluation, we should have more certainty about everything and I'm sure people will be happy. If expansion is chosen, we're not talking about a few changes; we will spend more than $300,000 in an attempt to create the "Coinbase of mining;" a one-stop shop that makes mining simple, accessible, and profitable for everyone. Until then, though, we are just in maintenance mode and aren't willing to make any big changes or investments, and hopefully you can understand why we need to wait for the lawyer's approval.
micca410evo
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Re: System offline

Post by micca410evo » Wed Sep 27, 2017 2:33 pm

Sounds good Steve, if it will expand i wanna be yours:

Image
dog1965
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Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:27 am

Re: System offline

Post by dog1965 » Wed Sep 27, 2017 5:33 pm

lkol lol lol lol.
ToddHandel
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Re: System offline

Post by ToddHandel » Thu Sep 28, 2017 1:20 am

And what is the timeframe for getting a response from these lawyers? Are you recommending that people leave the pool until they hear back from your lawyers? What I keep hearing is a lot of “exclamations“ and “justifications for why the service is experiencing continual problems. You guys clearly have a problem scaling, because your problems or software/code based ( at least, for the meantime). Your hick ups functionality seem to be the result of a variety of coding issues… I’m not so sure I subscribe to the “legal issues looming in the background“
Explanation. You can still fix the software and have it running at full capacity. At the end of the day this is a scalable business, the basic service provided is scalable, the fees you pay are scalable, the minors that are introduced or to your software… All of that is a scalability issue. Feels a little Mt.Goxy to blame any kind of software shortcomings on the “legal landscaping”… Lawyers did not crash the site yesterday, lawyers did not lose some deal with another morning platform… Focus on the software fellas. And if there’s some giant problem with the business structure, perhaps you should focus on that instead of fanciful stories and wouldbe rhetoric about healthcare.

Your problems are not going to come from government scrutiny, they going to come from several minors deciding to sue you guys to determine what happened to hours, days, weeks of missing payouts that went ‘somewhere’, and that somewhere is in the company bank accounts. Whether by accident, computer glitch, or some other kind of honest-seeming mistake... you guys are going to get butchered by direct lawsuits if you don’t get your stuff together.

Just my 2 cents.
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Steve Sokolowski
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Location: State College, PA

Re: System offline

Post by Steve Sokolowski » Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:57 am

ToddHandel wrote:And what is the timeframe for getting a response from these lawyers? Are you recommending that people leave the pool until they hear back from your lawyers? What I keep hearing is a lot of “exclamations“ and “justifications for why the service is experiencing continual problems. You guys clearly have a problem scaling, because your problems or software/code based ( at least, for the meantime). Your hick ups functionality seem to be the result of a variety of coding issues… I’m not so sure I subscribe to the “legal issues looming in the background“
Explanation. You can still fix the software and have it running at full capacity. At the end of the day this is a scalable business, the basic service provided is scalable, the fees you pay are scalable, the minors that are introduced or to your software… All of that is a scalability issue. Feels a little Mt.Goxy to blame any kind of software shortcomings on the “legal landscaping”… Lawyers did not crash the site yesterday, lawyers did not lose some deal with another morning platform… Focus on the software fellas. And if there’s some giant problem with the business structure, perhaps you should focus on that instead of fanciful stories and wouldbe rhetoric about healthcare.

Your problems are not going to come from government scrutiny, they going to come from several minors deciding to sue you guys to determine what happened to hours, days, weeks of missing payouts that went ‘somewhere’, and that somewhere is in the company bank accounts. Whether by accident, computer glitch, or some other kind of honest-seeming mistake... you guys are going to get butchered by direct lawsuits if you don’t get your stuff together.

Just my 2 cents.
I think the FAQ is best to answer your questions.

I know for sure that it is not possible to have an unlimited number of users. Coin assignment is an inherently singlethreaded operation. We can each algorithm on a single core, but I really don't know whether it is actually possible to grow a multipool past that. It's never been tried.

As to the lawyer, I'll again ask for your patience. Yes, the problems are software-based, but we can't invest until we hear from him. He needed two weeks, but there have been a few delays.
bellaminer
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:13 am

Re: System offline

Post by bellaminer » Thu Sep 28, 2017 7:04 am

DuncanBoaz wrote:All of this instability seems to come from the simple growing pains of the expanding Crypto Market. Xichas is correct. There are more machines then ever and it's only going to keep growing. That's Moore's Law.

What started as a hobby and a pipedream for many has become a profession and lifestyle. Cryptoland is no longer some small Niche. The world has noticed. When entire countries start talking about Digitizing their Fiat Currencies, changing economic laws, and trying to ban systems that threaten previous systems....A whole different prospective has to be taken.

ProHashing is a massive hub. The "workers" from 2 years ago pale in comparison to today. Delegating tasks beyond the reach of 2 people could significantly improve stability for the site and quality of product for all parties involved.

Screw this Switching to NH or "Fingers crossed you guys get stable" kind of comments.

What can we all do to help? How can we effectively tackle system problems? How many of us have AMPLE free time because we generate streams of income purely from placing orders on exchanges and running computers?

If a few of us work with the Brother's instead of chatting about how they could do things differently, we want to leave, and they "owe" us for our own security flaws it could all be better. It's pretty fantastic already.
Those comments you want to 'screw' are called feedback. These guys are running a business and for the privilege of using their site we give them 5% of our miner's profits. Its a great site with people who are dedicated to its success, but its still a business at the end of the day.

We as its customers have a right to complain when instability is constant and it results in lost profits. I don't want to give NH my money, but I want them to know that an average miner like myself is going elsewhere. I don't have free time to work on their servers- I have a full-time, 60+ hour a week job. I get you are bought-in and have drunk the cool aide. But this is a business and you have ZERO ownership in it. To that end, they need to fix their site or expect to get a reputation that will take a hell of a long time to fix in this industry.
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Steve Sokolowski
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Re: System offline

Post by Steve Sokolowski » Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:23 am

bellaminer wrote:
DuncanBoaz wrote:All of this instability seems to come from the simple growing pains of the expanding Crypto Market. Xichas is correct. There are more machines then ever and it's only going to keep growing. That's Moore's Law.

What started as a hobby and a pipedream for many has become a profession and lifestyle. Cryptoland is no longer some small Niche. The world has noticed. When entire countries start talking about Digitizing their Fiat Currencies, changing economic laws, and trying to ban systems that threaten previous systems....A whole different prospective has to be taken.

ProHashing is a massive hub. The "workers" from 2 years ago pale in comparison to today. Delegating tasks beyond the reach of 2 people could significantly improve stability for the site and quality of product for all parties involved.

Screw this Switching to NH or "Fingers crossed you guys get stable" kind of comments.

What can we all do to help? How can we effectively tackle system problems? How many of us have AMPLE free time because we generate streams of income purely from placing orders on exchanges and running computers?

If a few of us work with the Brother's instead of chatting about how they could do things differently, we want to leave, and they "owe" us for our own security flaws it could all be better. It's pretty fantastic already.
Those comments you want to 'screw' are called feedback. These guys are running a business and for the privilege of using their site we give them 5% of our miner's profits. Its a great site with people who are dedicated to its success, but its still a business at the end of the day.

We as its customers have a right to complain when instability is constant and it results in lost profits. I don't want to give NH my money, but I want them to know that an average miner like myself is going elsewhere. I don't have free time to work on their servers- I have a full-time, 60+ hour a week job. I get you are bought-in and have drunk the cool aide. But this is a business and you have ZERO ownership in it. To that end, they need to fix their site or expect to get a reputation that will take a hell of a long time to fix in this industry.
I understand your frustration, and I agree that you should do what you have to do. I apologize that you feel this way and wish that there was something we could do immediately to reduce this concern.

That said, I do want to point out that I think that a few of the expectations from some of the posts could be considered unrealistic. Some customers have suggested that we should just forget about consulting a lawyer, others have suggested we would get an immediate impact from hiring despite the search and training time, a few have expressed possibly unrealistic beliefs about algorithms and parallelism, and the fact that we need to plan to avoid bankruptcy during the next crash, not just during the good times like now, is often discounted.

We're working as hard as possible and want to provide the best quality service, and are working towards this end as quickly as possible. But on the other hand, there are fundamental limitations to what can be accomplished.
Last edited by Steve Sokolowski on Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:44 am, edited 2 times in total.
dog1965
Posts: 109
Joined: Sun Sep 03, 2017 8:27 am

Re: System offline

Post by dog1965 » Thu Sep 28, 2017 8:29 am

That sums that up.
bellaminer
Posts: 22
Joined: Thu Sep 21, 2017 9:13 am

Re: System offline

Post by bellaminer » Thu Sep 28, 2017 9:29 am

Steve Sokolowski wrote:
bellaminer wrote:
DuncanBoaz wrote:All of this instability seems to come from the simple growing pains of the expanding Crypto Market. Xichas is correct. There are more machines then ever and it's only going to keep growing. That's Moore's Law.

What started as a hobby and a pipedream for many has become a profession and lifestyle. Cryptoland is no longer some small Niche. The world has noticed. When entire countries start talking about Digitizing their Fiat Currencies, changing economic laws, and trying to ban systems that threaten previous systems....A whole different prospective has to be taken.

ProHashing is a massive hub. The "workers" from 2 years ago pale in comparison to today. Delegating tasks beyond the reach of 2 people could significantly improve stability for the site and quality of product for all parties involved.

Screw this Switching to NH or "Fingers crossed you guys get stable" kind of comments.

What can we all do to help? How can we effectively tackle system problems? How many of us have AMPLE free time because we generate streams of income purely from placing orders on exchanges and running computers?

If a few of us work with the Brother's instead of chatting about how they could do things differently, we want to leave, and they "owe" us for our own security flaws it could all be better. It's pretty fantastic already.
Those comments you want to 'screw' are called feedback. These guys are running a business and for the privilege of using their site we give them 5% of our miner's profits. Its a great site with people who are dedicated to its success, but its still a business at the end of the day.

We as its customers have a right to complain when instability is constant and it results in lost profits. I don't want to give NH my money, but I want them to know that an average miner like myself is going elsewhere. I don't have free time to work on their servers- I have a full-time, 60+ hour a week job. I get you are bought-in and have drunk the cool aide. But this is a business and you have ZERO ownership in it. To that end, they need to fix their site or expect to get a reputation that will take a hell of a long time to fix in this industry.
I understand your frustration, and I agree that you should do what you have to do. I apologize that you feel this way and wish that there was something we could do immediately to reduce this concern.

That said, I do want to point out that I think that a few of the expectations from some of the posts could be considered unrealistic. Some customers have suggested that we should just forget about consulting a lawyer, others have suggested we would get an immediate impact from hiring despite the search and training time, a few have expressed possibly unrealistic beliefs about algorithms and parallelism, and the fact that we need to plan to avoid bankruptcy during the next crash, not just during the good times like now, is often discounted.

We're working as hard as possible and want to provide the best quality service. But on the other hand, there are fundamental limitations to what can be accomplished.
I have intimate understanding of maintaining complex systems... I was an engineer/programmer for 12 years and the chief architect of a system that was responsible for logging billions of phone/radio communications across complex multi-system deployments. Now I'm a lawyer.. for better or for worse, and I agree that you should make sure you are operating within the law. I have perspective from both sides now and think you are right to be cautious both technically and legally.

I am not going to make any unreasonable demand or otherwise play arm-chair quarterback and tell you how to 'easily' fix things. There never is an easy fix, just trade-offs. Hiring people is not going to necessarily fix anything. I suspect this is a very complex system and it requires a ton of tribal knowledge.. knowledge that exclusively resides with you and another (your brother). It may not be practical to bring anyone on until you can forecast earnings and justify the expense.

Again, I want to bring all my miners here and hope everything can get worked out. I think the key to profitability for you is not necessarily super-inflated coin values, but the sheer number of miners you can service. Come Dec. 1, I am going from 1 miner to 14.. and I think you will very likely see 3x the number of miners you presently have online.

If you are locked into a single-threaded model, which I totally get, then you need to divide into multiple such servers and then average the return across each of the servers... I suspect you already thought of that. Parallelism (within a single application) sounds great in theory, but simply not practical to maintain given how evolving the crypto mining algorithm is.
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Steve Sokolowski
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Location: State College, PA

Re: System offline

Post by Steve Sokolowski » Thu Sep 28, 2017 11:16 am

bellaminer wrote:
Steve Sokolowski wrote:
bellaminer wrote:
Those comments you want to 'screw' are called feedback. These guys are running a business and for the privilege of using their site we give them 5% of our miner's profits. Its a great site with people who are dedicated to its success, but its still a business at the end of the day.

We as its customers have a right to complain when instability is constant and it results in lost profits. I don't want to give NH my money, but I want them to know that an average miner like myself is going elsewhere. I don't have free time to work on their servers- I have a full-time, 60+ hour a week job. I get you are bought-in and have drunk the cool aide. But this is a business and you have ZERO ownership in it. To that end, they need to fix their site or expect to get a reputation that will take a hell of a long time to fix in this industry.
I understand your frustration, and I agree that you should do what you have to do. I apologize that you feel this way and wish that there was something we could do immediately to reduce this concern.

That said, I do want to point out that I think that a few of the expectations from some of the posts could be considered unrealistic. Some customers have suggested that we should just forget about consulting a lawyer, others have suggested we would get an immediate impact from hiring despite the search and training time, a few have expressed possibly unrealistic beliefs about algorithms and parallelism, and the fact that we need to plan to avoid bankruptcy during the next crash, not just during the good times like now, is often discounted.

We're working as hard as possible and want to provide the best quality service. But on the other hand, there are fundamental limitations to what can be accomplished.
I have intimate understanding of maintaining complex systems... I was an engineer/programmer for 12 years and the chief architect of a system that was responsible for logging billions of phone/radio communications across complex multi-system deployments. Now I'm a lawyer.. for better or for worse, and I agree that you should make sure you are operating within the law. I have perspective from both sides now and think you are right to be cautious both technically and legally.

I am not going to make any unreasonable demand or otherwise play arm-chair quarterback and tell you how to 'easily' fix things. There never is an easy fix, just trade-offs. Hiring people is not going to necessarily fix anything. I suspect this is a very complex system and it requires a ton of tribal knowledge.. knowledge that exclusively resides with you and another (your brother). It may not be practical to bring anyone on until you can forecast earnings and justify the expense.

Again, I want to bring all my miners here and hope everything can get worked out. I think the key to profitability for you is not necessarily super-inflated coin values, but the sheer number of miners you can service. Come Dec. 1, I am going from 1 miner to 14.. and I think you will very likely see 3x the number of miners you presently have online.

If you are locked into a single-threaded model, which I totally get, then you need to divide into multiple such servers and then average the return across each of the servers... I suspect you already thought of that. Parallelism (within a single application) sounds great in theory, but simply not practical to maintain given how evolving the crypto mining algorithm is.
Perhaps you could help think this issue of parallelism through, because it seems that you know a lot and could contribute.

The critical problem with coin assignment is that there is a limit to how much hashrate can be assigned to a network. If the limit were to be exceeded, then two problems happen: first, so many blocks would be found that many of them would be orphaned; and second, if we exceed 50% of a network, then we actually make less profit because any more hashrate reduces profitability more for our own pool than for other pools.

Therefore, we can't just assign each miner at the same time to the most profitable coin, which would be parallelizable. We need to assign one miner to a coin, increment the amount of hashrate assigned to that coin, assign the next miner to that coin or another one, increment the hashrate, and so on until all miners are assigned.

I have yet to figure out a parallel algorithm for how to do this task. The only parallelism exists between algorithms, since miners can only mine one algorithm at a time. Feel free to think this one through if you have an insight.
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