Status as of Thursday, August 28

[Steve Sokolowski]

Now that we've got a new forum, I can get back to posting status updates. Let's see where we stand.

• It turns out that there are two separate issues causing lost blocks. The first issue, which I fixed as much as possible, was caused by miners continuing to mine existing blocks past a block submission. The daemon would lose blocks that were double-submitted because you can't have two blocks with the same previous hash. However, I can't fix this all the way because there is still a 0.2s delay between the time someone finds a block and we can reply with the next block data to the miners. We are essentially orphaning our own blocks due to network latency. However, the fix increased profitability by about 5-10%.
• The second issue occurs in coins like netcoins, and the cause is unknown. We are considering cancelling our trip to Philly this weekend for the holiday and that will give us three full days to address this and other remaining issues.
• The RAID card for the development server arrived and Chris will have it installed today. The new router also arrived, and if we don't go to Philly, then we'll ship it there and it will probably arrive on Tuesday or Wednesday.
• Poloniex is being extremely helpful and we should be able to work with them to implement trading quickly, since they just created a "push" API.
• The only remaining programming issue in this release that I'm aware of is that we need to confirm that the accounting tables are matching up with our trades. Even if these don't match up, it doesn't affect the pool's operation, but we need to get them working at some point to be able to track money.
• I'm going to add the ability to hotswap code to the production mining server, so that I can add debug statements to resolve issues like the lost blocks more quickly without having to restart the entire program and have 2 minutes of downtime each time.

The major task right now is to obtain more testers for the pool. Obtaining testers for the pool has proven to be difficult. Chris made a post to the bitcointalk.org forums and it didn't receive any replies. He said he knows of another set of cryptocurrency discussion forums that he can post at, so we'll try there. If that doesn't work, then we probably need to delay for a week or two and spend time optimizing the site for Google searches, paying for AdWords, and doing that sort of thing. That means opening without a period of public testing, which is more likely to result in a problem, but if we can't get testers, then we'll have to do what we can.