Status as of Monday, November 10

[Steve Sokolowski]

We have five new changes that will be released as soon as Chris completes their testing:

• The "coin status" chart will now have eight new columns in it to allow people who want to choose a single coin to mine to better estimate profitability for each coin, along with difficulty and other important variables.
• We made a change to daemon-network-management, which throttles daemon upload bandwidth. Now, all of the daemons will be throttled at 15Mbps (in total) until a block is found, when the block daemon is unthrottled for 15s to give it a dedicated 50Mbps for distributing the block to the networks. This should reduce orphans further, and therefore, increase profitability.
• There is a change to reduce the situation where a block is found, the pool switches to a new coin because the old work is stale, and then after the first network accepts the block the pool switches back. Now, this situation will only occur if the first coin is 1.05 times more profitable than the switched coin (the actual factor might change), because there is some percentage of profitability lost in the work restart and it doesn't pay to gain 5% for a few seconds.
• An API call will be made available at /exchange/instantProfitability, which will allow these new meta-pools that switch hashrate between pools to determine how much the auto-switching algorithm is paying at this exact second.
• An issue has been fixed that sometimes causes "share is above target" errors. The cause of the problem is that the stratum mining protocol only applies difficulty adjustments to the next block, rather than the current one. In the current release, we check submitted jobs against the new difficulty, even though the miner isn't supposed to submit higher difficulty jobs until the next block. Since difficulties increase by a factor of 2, this issue causes a loss of about 50% of shares for people using dynamic difficulties when they have just connected. However, after a few minutes, the auto-adjustment algorithm will determine the optimal difficulty and this bug won't be a problem anymore, since it only occurs when the miner's difficulty changes. You can work around the issue either by sticking out the losses for 15 minutes upon connecting for the very first time, or by setting a static difficulty until we have the next release.