Status as of Wednesday, November 12

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's today's status:

• We finally got the "share is above target" issue. It turns out that the problem was another concurrency issue. The steps to reproduce the problem are as follows: connect multiple miners to the same account name, with each miner having a different static difficulty, or all of them having a dynamic difficulty. The code assumes that the first miner connecting receives the first difficulty assignment, but that isn't necessarily the case because a context switch could cause the other miners to be sent data first. Then, all of the miners on the account except for one are assigned the wrong difficulties, so most of their shares are rejected.
• The workaround for the issue is slightly different than we thought: you need to set all of your miners to the same static difficulty; setting even one of them to a different difficulty results in some miners receiving rejected shares or being underpaid.
• This issue has been fixed and is in testing, so hopefully we'll get it out by the weekend. Chris is hard at work on testing and knows that this issue is the #1 priority.
• I was very lucky to get up this morning and notice this huge run and quickly buy three bitcoins. We had been unlucky the past few days, and it would have been catastrophic if I hadn't noticed this and had to buy after a bubble rose to $600 or something like that (or worse, $1000). Hopefully our luck will improve soon.
• Note: I edited this post to point out that some people are having problems receiving forum E-Mails since we transitioned the hosting provider for the forums. Chris is working on the issue and hopes to get that fixed soon.