Status as of Monday, December 15

Post by **Steve Sokolowski** » Mon Dec 15, 2014 9:16 am

It seems quiet around here recently. I guess that when things are working OK, nobody complains, which is a good thing. As the holidays (and the massive break for them) approaches in four days, here's the status of things:

We are close to a release to fix many issues that I will describe below. This release has been about one month in development.
The first fix to be released next is a profitability issue where the numbers being reported to PoolPicker, and displayed at the top of the page, are about 10-15%, on average, below the actual payouts. The cause of the problem is a concurrency issue where we would switch coins, and the profitability of the new coin would be calculated before the new block reward, difficulty, and price was available to use as inputs.
Second, we resolved an issue with transaction fees, where some people would not be paid for transaction fees. The effects of this fix are minimal; less than 1%.
There is a fix for a concurrency issue where a block would be found, but the share that found the block would not be inserted into the database yet because a context switch had occurred on the database. The previous code would just detect the problem and halt the insert of entire groups of shares, which could cause a loss of money in some cases. In the new version, we insert the other shares even if a block is missing its corresponding share, and we also fix the concurrency issue itself so that it should rarely occur.
The table displaying the current profitability of coins was being updated in real-time for errors, but it turns out that profitability numbers were out of date. The optimal coin was being chosen, but the data being displayed does not reflect what the mining server is actually using to compute profits. That issue will be fixed, and these statistics should be real-time soon.

After this release is issued, then I will move onto multiple exchanges. The plan is that we will release multiple exchange support before the end of the holidays on January 5. The code for this is already done, so we need to begin testing with Poloniex. Since Poloniex has many profitable coins, we can expect an increase of profitability after the holidays.

If there is time available during the holidays, we should also be able to pretty easily mine multiple coins simultaneously. The only reason we haven't done this so far is because the profits to be gained are low compared to being able to support multiple exchanges.

Some people have suggested that we support other algorithms than scrypt. While we would like to do that eventually, the best way to go bankrupt is to lose focus on your core area of business. We want to get scrypt mining to be the most profitable pool every single day, and then all these enhancements will translate easily to the other coins.