Status as of Monday, March 12, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning!

• It turns out that the enterprise-class Internet connection is held up by permitting in the township government. Comcast needs permits to bury cables under public land, and that is what stopped them from continuing after they ran the cable from the server rack to the outside of the building. The utility poles are on the other side of a public road. They delayed their projected installation time from this the original target of around today until mid to late April, about 4-6 weeks from now.
• After some research this morning, it turns out that the "1MH/s expected payouts" chart is incorrect for yesterday. I'll run a query to fix it later today. The amount earned by the pool is correct, but the estimated LTC profit is too high. LTC increased in difficulty, driving profit down on the network, but the reported value remained steady because it multiplies the earnings per second by 86400 seconds in a day. There were only 82800 seconds in yesterday due to the time change, so the multiplication assumed the day was longer than it actually was. This has been a known issue since 2013, but since it only happens twice a year and the formula to determine it is complex, we just decided to ignore it.
• I'd like to read a study that estimates how much productivity is lost due to coding necessary to deal with the idiocy of Daylight Savings Time; surely some [CENSORED] has compiled one. The world would be better off if it didn't exist, and we wouldn't have to wake up in the pitch black in October, early November, and March too. Florida, incidentally, is actually trying to make the problem worse by extending Daylight Savings Time all year! Since permanent Daylight time has been proven untenable everywhere it's been tried (see Russia, where parents railed against the government for making their kids walk to school in the dark at 9:00am), that is unlikely to last very long.
• We have hired a fifth employee, who will start working part time in early April to perform business-related tasks. She'll deal with things like accounting, moving the business's reserve and profits to cold wallets, calculating taxes, paying people, and so on.
• One of her first tasks will be to review the W8-BEN and W8-BEN-E forms for completeness and reasonableness. We need to reject forms with trivial issues, like missing signatures. If you don't hear from us by April, you can assume that there is no problem and you'll never be contacted about the forms again. As stated a few days ago, we were incorrect in our initial statement about filing these forms. We are not required to file the forms with the IRS, so they will be stored offline on an SD card and never looked at again unless they are needed to defend against a lawsuit or audit.
• On these forms, I wanted to write a brief aside. We understand that privacy is important to everyone. While we are almost always not required to perform identity verification, the law states that we may need to reject forms where we are given an obvious reason that the information provided is inaccurate. Some examples of these obvious reasons would be if a person states in a support ticket that he is purposely entering invalid information, calls us and demands us to release payment because (s)he will provide garbage data, or makes a post in these forums stating that (s)he lied on his or her form.
• There are quite a few tickets requesting fixes or features, so I wanted to clarify what types of fixes we are able to address currently. Right now, the mining server, website, tax information, and support tickets are our primary focus, as we are continuing to specialize. We hope that you've noticed the improvements recently with many website bugs being fixed and the mining server advancing with new algorithms. Coins and exchanges, however, will be the focus of the fourth employee starting in mid-April, so we don't anticipate being able to address issues like adding new coins, or fixing coins that constantly go into error because they only are listed on one unreliable exchange, until May. Once he starts and is able to start adding new exchanges, we should also see increases in profit as well. Until then, we appreciate your patience; there is limited talent available and even when qualified people are found, it takes a long time for them to start and be trained.