Status as of Monday, July 3, 2017
Posted: Mon Jul 03, 2017 7:39 am
Here's today's status:
- Chris tells me that he failed with last night's release and reverted it. I'm investigating what happened and he'll try again today. The issue may be a one-line change and a retry, since all the setup work is still good.
- Chris is working hard to stay up to date on the customer service requests. We apologize for delays with that. He got down to just one outstanding E-Mail on Friday night before the backlog continued. At some point this week, Chris is going to announce delayed support so that he can get the ticketing system online. The lack of a ticketing system is preventing us from working on a permanent solution to the support problem, and it also prevents us from hiring anyone to help with the issue.
- The ETH payout threshold will be rising in the coming days, because transaction fees are now 12 cents per person on transactions of a few dollars. I suggested to Chris that a $10 threshold would be adequate. He'll announce the threshold later this week.
- The bitcoin payout threshold will be lowered in the coming days, because the average bitcoin transaction fee has declined. Litecoin will remain the default payout coin.
- Some customers have brought up ETH payouts that haven't been sent. Chris has been investigating how to make the geth client work without UDP due to the DDoS attacks, and nobody in the geth forums has been helpful to him. The next step may be to ditch geth for an alternative ETH client, which will require coding and may have an incompatible wallet. We don't know how long it will be until this issue is permanently resolved.
- As to the long-term vision, we see SHA-256 mining as having diminished in importance. Not only did the attacks delay the implementation of SHA-256, but they revealed that time needs to be spent on automation of repetitive tasks, bugfixes, and stability first to improve customers' experiences. When a problem happens with the system, customers rightfully become angry, which is not what anyone wants. A secondary issue is that minor errors cause as many as 20 support requests. Therefore, SHA-256 mining will not be released on July 16 as originally scheduled before the attacks. Assuming there are no more attacks, late September seems like a good estimate.