Status as of Thursday, July 21

[Steve Sokolowski]

Good evening! This week brings lots of new features and additions to the pool. Here's an update on where the project stands.

• Our first new feature is the publication of our live WAMP API. It pushes updates on data like profitability to the user every time they change, so the user is instantly aware of the pool's status. This data can be used to develop bots that direct hashrate to the pool from cloud mining services, which will earn the programmer easy profit. For example, since NiceHash provides an API to obtain order prices, someone can write a bot that only rents hashrate from NiceHash when our payouts exceed NiceHash's. On average, we have been beating NiceHash, but there are days when our profitability has doubled that of NiceHash's, like when Yocoins became insanely profitable. In those instances, the bot programmer could earn hundreds or thousands of dollars, and the bot itself is very simple, something we could write in a few weekends.
• We are going to start advertising across forums to try to get someone to write this bot for NiceHash. This bot should have little risk because it wouldn't place any orders when there isn't any profit to be made. If you would like to write this bot, please contact us, and we will assist you with using the APIs. We aren't asking for any cut of your profit; we just want people to redirect NiceHash hashrate here so that we can both make money.
• At long last, we will also be introducing "solo mining" later this week. Solo mining was requested by several customers. Solo mining allows miners to mine a coin as if they had set up a daemon on their own computer. Each share either finds or doesn't find a block, and miners get paid for blocks they find. This setup eliminates the need for coin developers to set up "official pools." Fees for solo mining will be lower than those for PPS mining.
• However, solo mining here is better than setting it up yourself because you receive additional rewards from merge mining. Merge mining increases payouts by about 10%, so (after fees) you earn about 105%-107% of the profit you would earn by setting up a daemon yourself, without needing to go through all the trouble of doing so and without needing to spend money on RAM, bandwidth, and disk space for the blockchain.
• Our block explorers sometimes displayed a "block hash not found" error when all of a coin's markets had been in error for a lengthy period of time. We fixed the problem and also fixed a problem with the Anoncoin block explorer, which makes our explorer the only one that can handle the Anoncoin-specific RPC calls needed to make a block explorer work.
• I plan on asking Chris to obtain a performance profile of the pool this weekend, to ensure that it can handle capacity above 100GH/s. The profile may cause an increase in rejected shares for about five minutes while it is being conducted. We apologize for this problem in advance, and Chris will let you know when it is about to happen.
• We are considering adding Ethereum mining as our first non-scrypt algorithm, after the performance profile proves that CPU usage will not increase significantly because of it. We had considered SHA-256, but the uncertain future for bitcoin given the significant amount of money we would need to spend to buy servers has caused us to put that investment on hold for now. Another reason we settled on Ethereum is because many miners come to the pool wanting to use their GPUs, and have to get turned away. We welcome comments on this; if we move forward, we would expect to roll out Ethereum in early October.