Hi Folks,

Sorry about the intermittent responses, but as zneww says, I've been/am pretty busy these days.  But, let me set the record straight on a couple things:

1. No, I'm not secretly stealing any coins via merged mining, or any other fantastical ploy.
2. Yes, I setup ParallaxCoin yesterday, but no, it isn't currently doing merged mining yet.

In fact I added PLX mostly so I could study the requirements for merged mining on our backend and codebase, which appear to be non-trivial.  Not that merged mining PLX/EXE would currently amount to a windfall for the pool in itself, but the idea is intriguing, and I will continue to tinker with it to see if its something that can be added.  When and if I do add it, I will certainly announce it publicly (from the deck of my yacht, purchased with stolen merge-mined coins, of course).


I also wanted to loop back to another issue brought here recently, specifically the BTC transaction fee bug.  This issue has now been fixed, and users should no longer see transaction fees in their payouts (the pool now correctly covers these)

Hey Guys,

I just wanted to jump in here to clarify things a bit...  you're right, that transaction fee is ridiculous.  However, its not by design.  It would appear that you have discovered a bug in the payout system.  The nightly payments were incorrectly being sent individually instead of in a batch, increasing the transaction fees, and deducting them from the payments.  The way its supposed to work is that payments are sent in batches, and the pool absorbs the fees.  I will get this corrected asap, sorry for the mistake.

So with that understood, zneww is correct, I lowered the payout threshold to .001 to help the slower miners out.  Once this bug is fixed, is it safe to assume the lower payout threshold is a non-issue for folks?

JHammer- thanks and we're glad to have you.  I definitely will try to be a bit more talkative around here, but I also tend to hang out a bit more often in IRC, if you're looking to get me quickly.  As for LTC, its in our lineup, so we would mine it given the right circumstances (pool hashpower is a limiting factor currently). 

Cheers!

So, I'll chime in on a few of the recent posts/questions...

We seem to always be mining coin X.  The way this is shown on the website is a bit misleading currently, and is scheduled for an update.  This is because we mine multiple coins at the same time, but the "currently mining" box can only show one.  So, while we've actually been mining coin X, its not the only one.  (And you'd think we have an agenda seeing as the website always displays either DOPE or POT coins.)  So, for the time being, you can check out the coins page to see all the coins being mined at any given time (highlighted in green).  Our API will also be exposing a getpoolstats method which will show the specific coins being mined, as well as the percentage hashrate being directed to them.

Yes, our payout rate yesterday appeared to be about .004, which certainly isn't ideal, but it was about the same as the other major switching pools.  Almost exactly the same as clever, waffle, etc, actually.  So I'm not sure why there are statements like 'other pools are doing better than us'.  Further to this, we (unfortunately) had a bit of a clerical slipup yesterday which caused us to mine SPA coin when we intended to remove it (due to its hard fork switching to scrypt-n).  Had this error not occurred, I suspect we would have done a far sight better.
As I've said before, we're working on providing a running list of daily profitability for ease of comparison.  This is a high priority for me, as it will help clarify some concerns and conversations out there.  Its taken longer than hoped due to recent events, so to help give a bit of data to work with, I did post the past few days performance on our site.

Finally, to answer iru786's question, yes we pay old balances after there has been no activity for a while.  However, we also are happy to make payments upon request.  Ideally we would like to have a 'pay me now' button on the website, but with the chance for abuse, especially given the recent spike in unfriendly traffic, we've yet been able to come up with a comfortable way to achieve this.  I'm certainly open to suggestions on this topic, btw.

Suchmoon- Thanks! And I see what you mean about the graph not reflecting reality so well.  I'll add that to the short list to get ironed out.

JHammer - Great, I'm glad to hear things are a bit more stable.  Like I said, I haven't corrected 100% of the known issues, but it looks like we're defending against many of them now.  As for submitting stales, yes you certainly can (and probably should).  Due to the way we multiplex work, a stale could technically contain a solution. 

Hi All,

Yes, sorry for the lack of posting.  Things have been pretty hectic, and I've been focusing on major pool improvements, not to mention my new daughter (thanks for the well wishes!).  So, to try to answer a couple questions floating out there...

Yes, it appears we've been seeing our fare share of malicious activity lately, which has caused some service interruptions.  We have been, and continue to work on it, and it seems we've made some progress.  We hope to get some final fixes in place shortly.

As for our pool hashrate, a graph is actually available on our front page, at the bottom.  Another useful page to know about, if people don't already, is our pool stats overview.  Finally, we are working to provide a BTC/Mhs type chart, as seen elsewhere, but the recent events have caused some delays in rolling that out.

Finally, as we mine multiple coins simultaneously sometimes, the 'current coin' box can be a bit misleading.  To see the breakdown, you can take a peek at our coins page.

As always, feel free to contact me directly for any account specific questions.

Cheers,

Hey ryancpwalsh,

I wanted to jump in to confirm what zneww was saying about the graphs-- they have been fairly broken for a while.  They have also been under-reporting actual earnings (sometimes considerably) throughout the day, and occasionally do things like jump up and back down.  We're working on it :/  Actually, we did just fix part of the problem-- the graphs now show your progress a bit better during the day, as they account for most of the immature/mature/in transit coins properly.  The rest will be fixed very soon as we tack down the loose ends during our beta process.  Sorry for the alarm and confusion!

As for the earnings, we have good days and bad days, as do all coin-switching pools.  Coin price fluctuations, volatile difficulties, the whims of the wallets and exchanges, etc, work for and against us some days.  And, for the record, we are working on several improvements in the coming weeks that should help alot with our pool efficiency (therefore profitability).  Pool hash power doesn't hurt either, if we grow we can tackle some more difficult coins (ie. DOGE)-- but its not everything.

Also, we are going to be putting out data about our daily averages @ 1Mh/s to help people see how we've been doing a bit more easily.  We're open to suggestions/requests about information you would like to see on the site, as we'd like to be as transparent as possible about how we operate. 

Cheers,

-VTMiner

Hi alc,

Sorry to hear you've been left hanging in support.  I don't see any open tickets in our system, so if you PM me your details, I will make sure you are taken care of asap.

Cheers,

-VTMiner

Is that scrypt coin?  We only mine scrypt currently.
Also, you appear to have a name collision with an existing coin in our lineup (StableCoin - SBC)

Hi all, and thanks for the kind words.

I just wanted to let people know that we've been optimizing our coin lineup and rotation, and to take advantage of the growing size of the pool, we've added a handful of new coins to our mix:

http://coinsolver.com/coins.php
STR
EAC
TIPS
LEAF

We've also been improving the detail and clarity of our worker statistics, coin switching tuning, and expansion of our API.

Cheers,

-VTMiner

Hi dsergeevich,

Definitely, down the road.
Once we get out of beta, we hope to put up servers in Europe too.

Just an update, we've added a few new coins to our mining rotation, now up to 25.

New Coins:
MEOW
BQC

For convenience, we post our full coin with current profitability (every ~5 mins) on our site here.

Our current full coin list:
 FRK
 CGB
 MEOW
 WDC
 PHS
 TAG
 DGC
 EMD
 LOT
 NET
 ANC
 FST
 LTC
 MEC
 CAP
 SBC
 MNC
 GDC
 MOON
 BQC
 CSC
 CAT
 42
 DOGE

Thanks! 
We'd love to have you aboard... the more the merrier.

Hey all, I just wanted to announce our new scrypt coin mining pool... Coinsolver.com

 
CoinSovler is a new auto-switching scrypt coin mining pool that pays out directly in BitCoin.  We're still in Beta, so suggestions and feedback are most welcome, and we have many features in the works.  We intend for it to be dead simple to use, highly profitable and very transparent about the mining information.
 
Features:

    Completely anonymous-- no user registration
    All payouts are directly in BTC
    Automatically mine the most profitable scrypt coin
    Bonus payout awarded nightly to random miner!
    Very low 1% mining fee
    Snazzy graphs and detailed statistics
    Full API access
    Very active development, constantly expanding features

Pool address: coinsolver.com:3333

Website: coinsolver.com