Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Discussion of development releases of Prohashing / Requests for features
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The Development forum is for discussion of development releases of Prohashing and for feedback on the site, requests for features, etc.

While we can't promise we will be able to implement every feature request, we will give them each due consideration and do our best with the resources and staffing we have available.

For the full list of PROHASHING forums rules, please visit https://prohashing.com/help/prohashing- ... rms-forums.
JKDReaper
Posts: 99
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 11:17 am

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by JKDReaper » Fri Aug 18, 2017 3:41 pm

Ok, so I'm gonna just skip over the missing share part, that I've offered to 100% prove is happening...

As greg said above...Any way you look at it, we are now paying 20% fee. Are you kidding me? And I can't honestly figure out how to respond to you calling it a "gift". I'm generally good with words...But I'm honestly at a loss. Are you high? Tweaking? Because honestly that's the only POSSIBLE way I can imagine even YOU thinking it as a gift.

You lower profits across the board by 15%...I.....For the love of god, I can't even respond to this. I knew there was some business sense lacking here but jeez...Well, have fun I guess.
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vhmanu
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Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by vhmanu » Fri Aug 18, 2017 4:29 pm

geez calm down boys and girls.
What Steve meant to say was we got paid 115% instead of 100% and from now on we get our normal 100%. We are allowed to keep the extra 15% --> thats the gift Steve is speaking of

And because noone else said it:
Thanks Steve and Chris :)
JKDReaper
Posts: 99
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 11:17 am

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by JKDReaper » Fri Aug 18, 2017 6:14 pm

vhmanu wrote:geez calm down boys and girls.
What Steve meant to say was we got paid 115% instead of 100% and from now on we get our normal 100%. We are allowed to keep the extra 15% --> thats the gift Steve is speaking of

And because noone else said it:
Thanks Steve and Chris :)
Actually your dead wrong. Run the numbers...I watched the entire list of coins drop almost 20% as it happened. Also have a list of coins and their profitability in regards to difficulty...The entire coin base that I've checked is down 15 +/- %. I don't post till I know what I'm talking about, before you fanboys tell me to calm down, I'd suggest doing the same.
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vhmanu
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Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by vhmanu » Fri Aug 18, 2017 6:35 pm

JKDReaper wrote:Actually your dead wrong. Run the numbers...I watched the entire list of coins drop almost 20% as it happened. Also have a list of coins and their profitability in regards to difficulty...The entire coin base that I've checked is down 15 +/- %. I don't post till I know what I'm talking about, before you fanboys tell me to calm down, I'd suggest doing the same.
Could your 15% difference be this?
Profitability/Pool Fee Error
There are a few days where the numbers match and on others the numbers are way off.
I noticed a difference between 10-20% for several days in a row and all i got was a guessing by Chris a few weeks ago

PS: as you see im no "fanboy" ;)
JKDReaper
Posts: 99
Joined: Fri Mar 31, 2017 11:17 am

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by JKDReaper » Fri Aug 18, 2017 7:15 pm

The profitability changes every time a block solves for mist coins, as the difficulty increases or decreases. When you compare the previous profitability of the coins I've checked so far, every one has decreased right at 15% across the difficulty spectrum. Exceptions being coins with fairly large sized changes in the sell/buy prices...But those also when calculated to scale of their value change, also right at 15% less.

And this is on top of me watching a live feed of the profitability of every coin. One minute they were at one point, seconds later when updates, every coin was down between 15-20%.

The profitability of the coins across the board is 15% lower. Combine this with what SOUNDS like an attempt to "average" profitability to everyone regardless if u are mining a coin with .40 and I'm mining a coin with .20, respective profitability. I won't say this is what IS going to happen, but that's what it sounds like the end plan will be. If that's the case, when u combine the 15% decrease with what could be as much as 20-40% depending on what coins you mine (IF that happens) then some people could see their profits fall nearly 50%.

The 15% is unacceptable alone...Add the rest, and its worse than an insult. On July 20, Steve posted this...

I'm still investigating, but I think the issue may be that the live profitability is including static coin miners who are mining less profitable coins and bringing down the average. They shouldn't be counted in that live stats. If so, everyone is still being credited properly on the backend; it's just that the live calculation is wrong

Now its a complete reversal it seems.
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Steve Sokolowski
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Location: State College, PA

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by Steve Sokolowski » Sat Aug 19, 2017 8:03 am

The 15% difference issue is our temporary fix to the fact that the profitabilities being inserted in the database are 15% too high. For now, we simply adjust downward before publishing earnings data, and eventually we'll be able to figure out exactly what has caused the 15% discrepancy. As Reaper pointed out, the issue has reversed from last week, when miners were being underpaid. Until about August 15, we corrected balances upward, then we overpaid miners for 3 days, and now we've adjusted downward.

The data in live profitability is what you will actually earn after adjustment, so this is still fair and everyone is being paid exactly what is published.
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Eyedol-X
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Joined: Sun Nov 06, 2016 1:45 pm

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by Eyedol-X » Sat Aug 19, 2017 1:00 pm

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Hi!
  • Over the past few days, there were duplicate shares inserted that increased profits by 15% over what was promised. Because of the earlier share issues, we don't plan to adjust profit downward, so everyone can consider the additional earnings as a gift for dealing with the issues last week. Thanks! Note that even if the same coins are profitable today, you should still expect to earn 15% less today because we adjusted for this issue. The WAMP live profitability is what you should expect to earn, and it may differ from individual coin profitabilities because we are adjusting the
  • The WAMP server is overloaded again, despite having increased its capacity by about 2x. The website is running out of database connections because there has been a surge in usage of the block explorers. The mining server has stale shares because coin assignment is currently running suboptimally to reduce CPU power. There are also connection issues caused by the VPN with Javapipe.
  • The one problem that doesn't seem to be occurring right now is missing shares. The last known case of that issue occurred on Tuesday, and all balances were corrected for missing shares. The "selected recent shares" only lists a random sample of shares, so not seeing shares there does not indicate shares missing.
  • There are currently about 100 outstanding support tickets. We resolved about 30 tickets yesterday. Thank you for your patience while we resolve the tickets. As a reminder, tickets are the only guaranteed way to receive a response to your questions, and since tickets are addressed in chronological order, submitting multiple tickets can't result in a faster response. Forum posts and private messages are not guaranteed support methods.
  • Most of the problems are due to not having enough manpower to address all issues. As stated before, we will be evaluating whether it will be more profitable to go up or down on Sunday and Tuesday. If we decide to go down, we will close registrations, eliminate features like block explorers that require maintenance and provide publicity that we wouldn't need, and allow attrition to reduce the number of miners as we fix issues over the next year or so.
  • If we decide to go up, we will spend money on a better connection and look to start hiring people in October. The main considerations we are still heavily researching include the state of our competitors, the value of coins after the current bubble pops, legal issues that we might have overlooked, and the simple issue of whether if we tried to become rich, our lives would really be any different than simply having an income sufficient to not worry about meeting rent every month. For example, what's the point of having a Galaxy S7 compared to an S6? That last concern is what has been giving me the most pause lately.
  • One thing we're sure about is that we want to make our customers' lives better. Staying at the current level has pretty much been ruled out, so service quality will improve one way or the other.
  • Again, we apologize for the performance issues lately and hope to provide better service soon! We really appreciate the customers who have stuck with us through this time and I would really like to thank Chris for all the hard work and dedication he puts towards the support tickets!

Thanks for the work you and Chris are putting into this business endeavor.

I'm going to premise my comments with this disclaimer: I'm not going to complain about what was up or down or what profit was missed vs what was awarded. My take away is perhaps a different perspective than others, it's maybe one that isn't being talked about or realized by others.

if I understand correctly, there are known drainers to the site and pool performance that are being caused by extracurricular functions or services such as block explorers. It's my understanding that due to an increase of traffic overall services are being impacted and that this impact is having a cascading effect on other things such as connectivity and general system performance.

To me the simple fix first here is to eliminate these extra services immediately. Solidify your foundational services like the website and the pool itself before adding new features like a touch sensor found on a Galaxy S7 Active but not an S6 active. If you have performance drainers that offer no customer impact or value in terms of coin returns but these drainers cost you money in terms of man hours to maintain you need to look at what value add it really provides. Personally, I could care less about block explorers but I do care about my returns on mining.

Secondly, I advise you to change your registration model and close registration for at least 30 days so you have an opportunity to solidify the systems in other areas, assuming 30 days enough time to make effective gains or progress. Some potential customers being turned away may be upset by this decision but it will allow you to better manage and add value to your existing customers. Separately it will provide you an opportunity (hopefully) to work through your support backlogs by eliminating the "noob factor". To put it simply if you're in the business of supplying a service to your customers but you don't have the capacity to operate at a level equivalent to customer demands, you have two choices as you have outlined, to rapidly expand or to take a step back.

Often rapid expansion creates more problems than it solves unless you've got the "new wheel" that's going to revolutionize the industry. If you truly believe this current boom is a bubble then I would advise taking a step back and stabilize what you have before moving forward with a planned and calculated expansion endeavor.

The last thing I want to see is you guys get burned out and this pool shut down or get sold off to some entity that runs it into the ground. I think you guys really have something significant that could potentially make you rich some day but it's better to take cautionary steps than to take huge leaps of risk IMO right now.

In Summary: You can't please everyone and what I suggest you do next is evaluate the best way to keep the pool going long term while simultaneously addressing and eliminating the problems it has today. I think once you get on the SHA256 map your issues with performance are only going to get worse than they already are and I'm sure you realized this too which is why you delayed SHA256. Registration Suspension will reduce the impact of the flood of new X11 and Scrypt miners being shipped and delivered within the coming 30-90 days. Right now it's just X11 and Scrypt, stick to the basics for functionality, strip away bells and whistles that add no customer impact or significant value and only add them back once you have remedied the issues, added customer value, and solidified the customer experience.
mrgoldy
Posts: 55
Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2017 10:18 pm

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by mrgoldy » Sat Aug 19, 2017 1:26 pm

something to consider stripping: electric cost
makes no sense if you are renting or renting and home rig
frphm
Posts: 30
Joined: Thu Jun 01, 2017 1:39 am

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by frphm » Sat Aug 19, 2017 10:34 pm

Steve Sokolowski wrote:Hi!
  • Over the past few days, there were duplicate shares inserted that increased profits by 15% over what was promised. Because of the earlier share issues, we don't plan to adjust profit downward, so everyone can consider the additional earnings as a gift for dealing with the issues last week. Thanks! Note that even if the same coins are profitable today, you should still expect to earn 15% less today because we adjusted for this issue. The WAMP live profitability is what you should expect to earn, and it may differ from individual coin profitabilities because we are adjusting the
  • The WAMP server is overloaded again, despite having increased its capacity by about 2x. The website is running out of database connections because there has been a surge in usage of the block explorers. The mining server has stale shares because coin assignment is currently running suboptimally to reduce CPU power. There are also connection issues caused by the VPN with Javapipe.
  • The one problem that doesn't seem to be occurring right now is missing shares. The last known case of that issue occurred on Tuesday, and all balances were corrected for missing shares. The "selected recent shares" only lists a random sample of shares, so not seeing shares there does not indicate shares missing.
  • There are currently about 100 outstanding support tickets. We resolved about 30 tickets yesterday. Thank you for your patience while we resolve the tickets. As a reminder, tickets are the only guaranteed way to receive a response to your questions, and since tickets are addressed in chronological order, submitting multiple tickets can't result in a faster response. Forum posts and private messages are not guaranteed support methods.
  • Most of the problems are due to not having enough manpower to address all issues. As stated before, we will be evaluating whether it will be more profitable to go up or down on Sunday and Tuesday. If we decide to go down, we will close registrations, eliminate features like block explorers that require maintenance and provide publicity that we wouldn't need, and allow attrition to reduce the number of miners as we fix issues over the next year or so.
  • If we decide to go up, we will spend money on a better connection and look to start hiring people in October. The main considerations we are still heavily researching include the state of our competitors, the value of coins after the current bubble pops, legal issues that we might have overlooked, and the simple issue of whether if we tried to become rich, our lives would really be any different than simply having an income sufficient to not worry about meeting rent every month. For example, what's the point of having a Galaxy S7 compared to an S6? That last concern is what has been giving me the most pause lately.
  • One thing we're sure about is that we want to make our customers' lives better. Staying at the current level has pretty much been ruled out, so service quality will improve one way or the other.
  • Again, we apologize for the performance issues lately and hope to provide better service soon! We really appreciate the customers who have stuck with us through this time and I would really like to thank Chris for all the hard work and dedication he puts towards the support tickets!
I'm disappointed to see the bubble concept returning. This is starting to feel like the cult leaders that constantly declare that X date will be the end of the world...and then it never happens.

You've said in the past that you can't have multiple servers because communication between them would introduce too much lag. Why not duplicate the entire setup - mining and switching - and workers can fluctuate between the two based on load? What would be the problem with this, besides some pretty minuscule (in the grand scheme of things) hardware costs?

If you decide you have no interest expanding the pool "to become rich", then please entertain the idea of licensing your software to people that ARE interested in continuing to expand this service. I get it, you're pretty clearly burning out - you aren't writing long posts about general crypto concepts that interest you, and your time seems dominated by troubleshooting and dealing with angry people. But this is the nature of a service like this, and is only caused by the fact that you wont hire people. Once you do, not only will performance improve, but we'll get to go back to being friendly and chatty with you guys again, instead of bombarding you with problems whenever you show up online.

Meanwhile, you have the best Slack community in crypto (which you inexplicably refuse to join), full of a bunch of people that help each other out all the time. Heck, @jkdreaper and @maxumark did a Litecoin giveaway. @N00bminer helped me figure out some GPU problems I was having today, and refused to take the LTC bounty I had offered. And @gregorygharding is there every day helping people, and set up the durn Slack in the first place. I mean really, if I were you I'd invest into this business simply because it has attracted such amazing people!

I dunno man. I just don't understand.
jinxorbit
Posts: 40
Joined: Thu Apr 06, 2017 4:20 pm

Re: Status as of Friday, August 18, 2017

Post by jinxorbit » Sun Aug 20, 2017 7:41 am

[*] If we decide to go up, we will spend money on a better connection and look to start hiring people in October. The main considerations we are still heavily researching include the state of our competitors, the value of coins after the current bubble pops, legal issues that we might have overlooked, and the simple issue of whether if we tried to become rich, our lives would really be any different than simply having an income sufficient to not worry about meeting rent every month. For example, what's the point of having a Galaxy S7 compared to an S6? That last concern is what has been giving me the most pause lately.
[*] One thing we're sure about is that we want to make our customers' lives better. Staying at the current level has pretty much been ruled out, so service quality will improve one way or the other.
From a business standpoint, if it isn't growing then it is dying. You have taken the project this far, but the next step may be the most painful. When you take on employees, your position might change from a developer to manager. At this point you could hire a manager and continue your development position, but take a second seat in the decision making process. If your just paying the bills, wouldn't it be nice to put some cash aside for retirement and maybe buy a house? Best wishes in this decision!
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