payout issues?

[bakedshibe]

I was wondering if there is an issue with payouts, i have a friend that signed up and is helping beta test, he has been over the payout threshold for over 24 hours and its not paying out. his username is jimlite if you guys want to check into it. thanks !

[Chris Sokolowski]

There are two issues occuring here:

First, over the weekend Steve found an error where the Bitcoin-USD price was not updating properly. When he fixed the issue, the bitcoin price declined 20% from the incorrect value to the correct value, therefore raising the payout threshold by 20% (since it is based on USD). This seems to have caused jimlite's balance to fall below the payout threshold.

Second, I found out that Steve made an undocumented change to the "aged" column, so it is now inconsistent with the explanation in the documentation. The underlying payout algorithm has not changed, but the "aged" column is now calculated 24 hours before the payout; previously it was calculated at the same time as the payout. The aged balance is now the amount of money that you will be paid out the next time 12:00AM ET rolls around, assuming the balance is above the threshold.

This change would make it seem like aged balanced were not being paid out on time, because, in the old version, you couldn't have an aged balance above the payout threshold. This change allows you to predict how much you will be paid at the next payout period making the aged column more useful. I will update the documentation with this change.

Now that we figured out the cause, is jimlite okay with mining more to meet the payout threshold, or would he prefer it to be lower in the future?

[bakedshibe]

Jimlite is one of the guys from qtl so he keeps his stuff mining there most of the time I dont know if there is a way for you to push his payout to him that would be cool. We have both been around and lost several times so payout issues sound the alarm.lol. We were talking a little bit about payouts, a manual button would be cool, I figured that was something you would implement later but certainly something I know people will ask for. I'll let you know if there are any other things we come across. Thanks Chris!

[Steve Sokolowski]

I just sent a message to jim asking him what the payout threshold should be, but now that I read your message, I think the solution is to add a "force payout" button, which allows people to request a payout of all available balances at 2:00am when the next payout period occurs, but at a loss of 5 cents to cover the network fees. That way, people who want to leave the pool permanently can do so, and we don't have to raise our rates to pay the fees associated with a lower payout threshold.

The idea would be that most people just continue mining with the pool and allow the payouts to happen, then when they stop for good, they can click the button and get the remainder of their money at a small price.

A further advantage of this option is that we can add a "comment box" to the request asking the user why he or she is leaving the pool, it more accurately allows us to track which accounts are active, and it gets rid of liability for money that isn't ours but which we have to have available. The comment box would allow us to gain feedback about what we were doing wrong.

[bakedshibe]

That sounds good. I have been over the payout amount for a few days now and havent tripped it, may want to see whats going on with that. thanks man.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Hmmm, I didn't know that. I thought it was just related to Kristof.

I'll need to further investigate that and get back to you later in the evening.

[Steve Sokolowski]

OK, I looked at this. This is the same issue as Kristof had - the value of your bitcoins crashed so much yesterday that you fell below the payout threshold. This is something that's going to take more time to decide how to deal with. It's also not as clear as it should be that because Shadecoins were so profitable today, most of your profits aren't available until tomorrow night's payout because the blocks have yet to mature.

In the meantime, I was able to make an optimization that will move payouts forward by about 5 hours, so that they now occur at 1:30 am instead of after 6:00am. I can't move them up to midnight because the coin networks need to confirm our withdrawals from Cryptsy before we can pay you out, but that should shorten the time a little bit.

Tomorrow, I'm going to work with Chris to figure out a better way to deal with these payout issues that will be consistent across the whole site and be easier to understand.

[jimlite]

bemining.net is merge mining aux pow 6 coins along with QTL, and other sites are merege mining 4 coins along with ltc. You don't just need to get doge for free, you can get 4-6 or more coins for free somehow. Check out bemining.net which requires wallet sigs, or http://www.simplemulti.com/configuration_guide which auto pays out all the 4 merged coins into your main coin, much simpler.

[Steve Sokolowski]

How are these guys doing that so quickly? It's amazing how merge mining didn't exist before about three weeks ago, and now all these pools have it.

I'll ask Chris to look into the other coins. At this point, it's probably more worthwhile to get dogecoins working first, because merge mining is extremely difficult to implement. Are the other coins valuable enough to justify the extra work to figure out the second merkle tree required for having multiple auxiliary coins?

[jimlite]

How are these guys doing that so quickly? It's amazing how merge mining didn't exist before about three weeks ago, and now all these pools have it.

I'll ask Chris to look into the other coins. At this point, it's probably more worthwhile to get dogecoins working first, because merge mining is extremely difficult to implement. Are the other coins valuable enough to justify the extra work to figure out the second merkle tree required for having multiple auxiliary coins?

I'm not a programmer anymore, but probably not. The only thing is you will almost never get a doge block with your low hashrate, so until the pool gets much bigger, that is why these pools under a GH or two are merge mining like 6 crap coins, they get more blocks and they are worth something at Komkort or Allcoin I guess.