Status as of Monday, November 26, 2018

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! Thanksgiving's over, and now it's time to get work hard.

• During the holiday week, the motherboard for the database server began randomly rebooting. Chris was unable to determine the cause of the reboots. An Internet search reveals that some other owners of this motherboard have also had this problem, and that the only way they were eventually able to resolve the issue was to replace the motherboard. Chris will order a new motherboard today. In the meantime, if this motherboard fails again, mining will not be affected since the system can handle temporary database outages. The website would go offline for a period of time and statistics would be out of date until everything caught up an hour after the system came back online.
• Yesterday, there was a problem with Bitcoin Cash mining. The Bitcoin Cash clients were returning "invalid address" errors, and it isn't known why they suddenly started with these errors on Sunday instead of when we first installed the new versions of Bitcoin Cash. I'm going to try to reproduce the issue in development today and hope to get a fix out tomorrow.
• Over the next few days, we'll be reevaluating how much effort should be devoted to various features in light of changing market conditions. While the system is not in financial difficulty, the original projections were that, in the worst case, litecoins would see only a 90% loss of value. Instead, bitcoins have held up pretty well, while litecoins and especially Ethereum are far below anything that we thought were sensible valuations. Resources might be better spent focusing on the algorithms that have held up versus scrypt mining, which has seen 1/3 of its miners disappear over the past week.
• In the meantime, grouping of miners has entered testing. I'm going to review the feature this morning and we will be moving forward to integrate it with the mining server. Expect grouped statistics to be available within two weeks.

[GregoryGHarding]

Good morning! Thanksgiving's over, and now it's time to get work hard.

• During the holiday week, the motherboard for the database server began randomly rebooting. Chris was unable to determine the cause of the reboots. An Internet search reveals that some other owners of this motherboard have also had this problem, and that the only way they were eventually able to resolve the issue was to replace the motherboard. Chris will order a new motherboard today. In the meantime, if this motherboard fails again, mining will not be affected since the system can handle temporary database outages. The website would go offline for a period of time and statistics would be out of date until everything caught up an hour after the system came back online.
• Yesterday, there was a problem with Bitcoin Cash mining. The Bitcoin Cash clients were returning "invalid address" errors, and it isn't known why they suddenly started with these errors on Sunday instead of when we first installed the new versions of Bitcoin Cash. I'm going to try to reproduce the issue in development today and hope to get a fix out tomorrow.
• Over the next few days, we'll be reevaluating how much effort should be devoted to various features in light of changing market conditions. While the system is not in financial difficulty, the original projections were that, in the worst case, litecoins would see only a 90% loss of value. Instead, bitcoins have held up pretty well, while litecoins and especially Ethereum are far below anything that we thought were sensible valuations. Resources might be better spent focusing on the algorithms that have held up versus scrypt mining, which has seen 1/3 of its miners disappear over the past week.
• In the meantime, grouping of miners has entered testing. I'm going to review the feature this morning and we will be moving forward to integrate it with the mining server. Expect grouped statistics to be available within two weeks.

any updates regarding tickets to add more coins to specified alogrythms? or more exchange integrations? these two methods can help increase the pools income, although dont think scrypt is recoverable at this point

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good morning! Thanksgiving's over, and now it's time to get work hard.

• During the holiday week, the motherboard for the database server began randomly rebooting. Chris was unable to determine the cause of the reboots. An Internet search reveals that some other owners of this motherboard have also had this problem, and that the only way they were eventually able to resolve the issue was to replace the motherboard. Chris will order a new motherboard today. In the meantime, if this motherboard fails again, mining will not be affected since the system can handle temporary database outages. The website would go offline for a period of time and statistics would be out of date until everything caught up an hour after the system came back online.
• Yesterday, there was a problem with Bitcoin Cash mining. The Bitcoin Cash clients were returning "invalid address" errors, and it isn't known why they suddenly started with these errors on Sunday instead of when we first installed the new versions of Bitcoin Cash. I'm going to try to reproduce the issue in development today and hope to get a fix out tomorrow.
• Over the next few days, we'll be reevaluating how much effort should be devoted to various features in light of changing market conditions. While the system is not in financial difficulty, the original projections were that, in the worst case, litecoins would see only a 90% loss of value. Instead, bitcoins have held up pretty well, while litecoins and especially Ethereum are far below anything that we thought were sensible valuations. Resources might be better spent focusing on the algorithms that have held up versus scrypt mining, which has seen 1/3 of its miners disappear over the past week.
• In the meantime, grouping of miners has entered testing. I'm going to review the feature this morning and we will be moving forward to integrate it with the mining server. Expect grouped statistics to be available within two weeks.

any updates regarding tickets to add more coins to specified alogrythms? or more exchange integrations? these two methods can help increase the pools income, although dont think scrypt is recoverable at this point

These were delayed by the issues that were encountered yesterday.

However, we're already adding coins at the fastest possible rate. We've gotten through 200 STEX coins and identified 20 to add and are awaiting their blocks to be downloaded. The code to support these coins is done; the only limitation is searching for and adding them.

For now, it's just business as usual. Since LTC prices just fell, we'll wait several months to see whether a recovery is in order. We have $300,000 in reserve, so there is no danger of layoffs or shutting down. At current prices, the project is still earning a profit because SHA-256 hashrate has exceeded our projections and bitcoins have had greater staying power than we expected.

Even if the pool becomes unprofitable, it makes sense to draw down on that reserve because spending $300,000 now could yield $30m in profits when the next bubble occurs. If we assume the same rate of growth from a start point of $980 this time, that implies the top at around $190,000 for BTC, with each 6.25 BTC block being worth a million dollars, and ETH being worth about $12,000. Every bubble is like a reset, which isn't like other industries. We could have the best pool in the world by that point and all the new miners will come here.

[CoffeeCup]

Not to completely play devils advocate here, but have you considered reaching out to the community to help discover new coins to add? I am sure you have some "trade secrets" on how you run Prohashing that you do not want to get out. I research coins every single day to keep up on what is new and profitable and I more than understand the headache and time consuming process it is. Just saying or asking if you have a community coin research group or do you like to keep it all in house?

[Steve Sokolowski]

At this point, the limiting factor is simply that we are not willing to increase labor costs by finding someone from the outside to accelerate the process. Coin prices have declined, and a long period of uncertainty is ahead.

[CoffeeCup]

I was not looking to be paid for helping my favorite pool succeed, BUT you need to take a look at this. https://support.cryptopia.co.nz/csm?id= ... 728a961972 I know alot of the coins we mine here use Cryptopia for trading. They put the Hammer down on alot of coins today.