Status as of Friday, September 19

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here are the list of things I'll be working on this weekend:

• jimlite called Chris last night and expressed concerns about the payout system. He asked Chris to expedite payouts, but I don't think that is possible because as a pay-per-share pool, the amount seen in balances is immature coins. However, I did start work on a checkbox that allows miners to ignore the payout threshold. That allows them to obtain small balances in a number of coins and be paid out even if they own less than $5 in a coin. It also allows people to close accounts. To use this option, the miner pays the transaction fee for every payout, which averages one cent per coin per day. It will still remain free to use the current "payout threshold" system, which is designed to reduce transaction fees.
• I should be able to get the backend working for multiple exchanges, although we will not be confident enough in our testing to release for at least one or two weeks.
• If anyone has a suggestion on how to improve wording on the payouts, that would be great. Perhaps "aged balance" should be changed to "mature balance?" Or, maybe there should be some additional columns. Perhaps the documentation is not clear enough to explain that the delay exists because we don't have the coins, and because we need to have a reserve to avoid going bankrupt on days of bad luck.

[cryptorific]

• Well I didn't get the usual btc payout this morning, not sure if it was because I was messing with the payout ratio and just didn't get enough btc but I certainly should have enough for tomorrow morning.
• I think mature would be a better heading instead of aged since that's the term more miners will be familiar with. I would recommend that you put a little question mark icon or asterisk next to it and have a little pop-up explanation when you move your cursor over it so people don't have to dig through the help page
• You can also add an exchanged column, this would be a column to express coins that have matured and have been exchanged to the desired coin while matured would be coins that have matured but not yet been exchanged.
• Also a concise FAQ page might be nice that explains why you have to wait 24-48 hours from when you start mining to when you get your first payout, also an answer to "why did I not get a payout in <randomcoin> even though I'm above the threshold"

[Steve Sokolowski]

I'll investigate this issue with payouts in about three hours. My guess is that last night, the number of bitcoin transactions went through the roof. Our transfer out of the exchange probably wasn't confirmed in two hours, because there were 911 kB blocks. When it came time to execute the payouts, there were insufficient funds in the local wallet.

If that's the case, then running the payout algorithm manually at 5:30pm will fix the problem. I'm not sure if there's anything we can do about this issue, though, and it's only going to get worse as the number of bitcoin transactions increases.

[cryptorific]

Figure out if that was the case?

Also any idea why btc-e is always lower than bitstamp or bitfinex? Is it just because it's relatively difficult to get dollars onto the exchange?

[Steve Sokolowski]

Chris looked into this.

It turns out that the cause of the problem is that your account lost so much value in the bitcoin crash this morning that it exceeded the payout threshold yesterday but fell below it today. The payout script pays out accounts that exceed the threshold at the time of payout.

That means that payouts take longer when the price falls and are more frequent when the price goes up.

I'm not sure if this can be dealt with effectively, because we don't store the value of the balances at the time of mining - or if it even is worth dealing with. I would hope that on most days, there won't be these sort of crashes, so this won't happen often.

[cryptorific]

Gotcha, The all time earnings column doesn't seem to be functioning. perhaps just added up all the payouts would be the best way to come up with those values? That would also help with coins that don't have any current balances but did have previous payouts.

[Steve Sokolowski]

Adding all the earnings would indeed be the best way to compute all-time earnings, but the problem with that is that the CPU usage to do that is immense for users who have been around for a while. It would make the site vulnerable to DoS attacks by just refreshing the page. To avoid that problem, we denormalized the database to add the value at the time of earnings. I'll add this issue to the bug list.

You might be interested to know that Chris started advertising yesterday. He spent a while and made a nice post to the bitcointalk.org forums, where some incredibly rude people immediately ruined the thread by claiming that merged mining was more profitable. Anyone who looks at the numbers can see that he's lying, but I told Chris that during this campaign, we don't under any circumstances reply to disrespectful people. Those people are illogical and such arguments go nowhere. I told him only to reply to respectful questions.

The ad was stunningly ineffective, yielding zero users.

I told Chris to post to the cryptocointalk.org forums next. Maybe he'll have better results there. Chris also got the pool added to poolpicker.eu, and the owner says he'll be doing the work this weekend.

[cryptorific]

I'm not all that surprised, bitcointalk is a cesspool without much substantive or rational discussion, except for maybe the dev subforum. I've posted to r/cryptocurrency ( http://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/ ... tocurrency) so lets try to get some upvotes.

[Chris Sokolowski]

Thanks for making the Reddit post. I just upvoted it.

The only reply at cryptocointalk was criticizing the pool for not prioritizing merge mining as one of his features. What he doesn't realize is that merge mining LTC+DOGE is only currently yielding $0.17/MH/s/day compared to $0.21/MH/s/day at this pool.

Steve made a good point to me today that all merge mining does is reduce the the profitability of each merged group to match the profitability of the individual coins that cannot be merge mined. Since multipools make mining essentially a perfect market, all that merge mining can do is ensure the survival of more coins; it can't provide mining profitability consistently higher than other coins.