- Equihash is waiting on the blockchains to download. The code is already ready and deployed. Bitcoin Gold will not be part of this release because the difficulty of its testnet increased to 1, making it too difficult to figure out what's wrong with our blocks in a reasonable amount of time.
- We found some issues with the website charts. Chris was supposed to deploy the fix for them yesterday, but forgot. He'll do it today.
- There are a lot of posts and comments here about tax issues. I understand that some people are frustrated and I don't want to over-delete topics, but it's also frustrating for people who want to talk about something else to constantly be beating this issue into the ground over and over. What do people think of making one thread for this topic, and then moving all posts and comments about it into that thread?
First, it seems that almost 30% of all complaints are centered around network connectivity issues. These are something that we're already working on, so it's good to see that we can eliminate many of these complaints simply by throwing money at the issue. This is very heartening.
Second, I was surprised to learn that many customers thought that our pool was less profitable than other pools. However, I need to gather more information about that issue to address it, so I posted a new poll. The goal of this new poll is to determine how much of a problem there actually is. In particular, I want to know whether people have actually tested profits recently or whether they are relying upon outdated information. I also want to deduce whether there actually is a problem, or whether people look at fees and assume that because a fee is lower, that the pool with the lower fee will pay more. We were already able to squeeze an additional 2% out of trading optimizations, so it will be interesting to see how people's opinions are affected by that improvement.
As to the other options on the first poll, the results demonstrate that we seem to be doing adequately with customer service. I'm glad to see that customer service has improved in the eyes of customers, because that was one of our first focuses when December came along. At one point, there were 200 tickets in the "waiting for support" queue; now, even in the busiest of times the queue never gets above 30.
The results about bugs are difficult to interpret and will require more investigation. I suspect that many of the "bugs" are an overlap from network connectivity issues, so we'll wait until that is resolved and then post a new poll about bugs. Constance is working on improving the website full time, with an "export to CSV" feature arriving next week, so we hope we are on the right track with the website features issues. We're also aware that there are issues with the sliders, as Wallace Branch pointed out, and those will be addressed soon. And yes, there are some issues that were not included in the poll, like the tax forms, but we purposely didn't include them because there was nothing that could be done about them.
In conclusion, what I gathered from the poll is that while there is a lot of work to be done, we seem to have already allocated resources appropriately towards the tasks customers see are most important. A new employee will start on April 9 to work hard on the profitability part, Constance is fixing up the website, and the enterprise Internet connection was ordered long before the poll. The only major change is that I'll be diverting more hours from bugfixes to investigating profitability issues over the next few weeks, based on the results of this poll, to accelerate the continuing improvements on that issue. I will shortly be posting a third poll asking miners what type of equipment they use, to get a better idea of the ratio of hardware, if that affects profitability. These polls are designed to get us information we need to improve the system, not to serve as publicity, so sometimes they will reveal negative information, and we don't try to hide that.
Thanks for your support, and thanks for voting! If there was something we missed, or if you disagree with this interpretation, let us know.