Hello Miners! We want to give you a more detailed look at the Ethereum payout situation and why some Ethereum Mining users are having trouble receiving their daily mining shares.
At Genesis Mining, we’re providing daily payouts for over a dozen independent Cryptocurrencies. All of these blockchain protocols are in constant development and each protocol network can suffer enormous pressure and transaction congestions at certain times as happened in the past. Some of these challenges are easily fixed in bulk, others need to be carefully reviewed one by one.
We not only need to keep every single software daemon updated, which is the easier part, but also carefully stress test all their capabilities as no software is ever bug free or immune to overload. Additionally, we’re constantly updating our own software to scale with and react to all network and market movements like transaction fees, gas prices and network congestions.
So, let’s cut to the chase of our payout module!
How do daily payouts work in a nutshell?
As soon as we’ve received all daily mining shares from the various pools we mine on, the funds accumulate on one of our various payout addresses. Meanwhile, our payout engine is sorting through all user hashpower shares and distributes the correct mining shares that are to be paid out. This process happens on the fly 24/7 as our service and databases are in constant change as users upgrade their hashpower, change their mining allocation, while the system is considering their minimum payout thresholds, wallet addresses et cetera.
A mining day lasts 24 hours and ends with all necessary network state calculations that have an impact on the payout itself. Additionally, we’re batching all our transactions to not deliberately congest the Ethereum network if at all possible: This is a process in which multiple transactions are bundled into one transaction ID to be collectively transferred on the blockchain, significantly reducing the fees and number of transactions on the network. After a payout has been successfully propagated to the network, the transactions gets confirmed, and our web services display the report in your account dashboard.
Because of a hard-coded limit on computation per block, the ethereum blockchain currently supports about 15 to 20 transactions per second. The Ethereum Raiden network is aiming to eradicate this bottleneck problem.
So why am I not receiving some payouts?
To put it simply, there’s no unique scenario for this. As you can see from one of our payout addresses, our system is constantly pushing transactions out. However, the average transaction fee changes every second and adapts to the current pending transaction queue.
The most common case for a failed payout (besides credit card purchase delays or minimum payout thresholds) is a transaction pending for a long time and/or being rejected by the network. Our payout system is automatically estimating the optimal fee for each transaction at the time, but as the network fills up with higher priority transactions, it sometimes happens that a bottleneck is created and the transaction won’t be included within the next few blocks due to too low gas prices (which are dynamic and dictated by market conditions). This is unfortunate, but estimating the right pricing for thousands of transactions at any time, is also a highly complex task. As soon as our system knows that a payout didn’t go through, we try again in the next payout cycle.
There is an exception to this, as sometimes payouts are flagged as success, while they were not actually received by the user. This is highly frustrating and we’re deeply sorry for this. As you can guess, as soon as payouts fall behind, they sometimes create a growing backlog that is putting more stress on the infrastructure. Tickets from our users regarding missing payouts are handled by our Customer Service and IT support team. Every case needs a manual check and failed transactions will then be re-submitted.
Unfortunately, no system is perfect, and sometimes a bug can create a whole wave of problems that our software team is tackling on a daily matter. For that reason, we still have a few very old cases that haven’t got their due attention and want to assure you that we’re working on getting you your hard earned coins.
What are we doing to fix these problems?
In a small enough environment, any transactions will be propagated flawlessly, however, as with any complex operation, the real challenge lies in scaling efficiently. As the blockchain networks evolve, every developer team faces different challenges and is pushing the boundaries, especially the core development teams.
Constant communication with the core developers is a must, as we’re trying to figure out the best and most suitable solutions for all upcoming challenges. For the short term, we’re testing and employing various smart contract solutions to automate and reinforce the processes for sending and re-submitting payout transactions.
Additionally, we’re progressing on various dashboard improvements that will enable you to manage your mining activities more properly. High priority features in this case are: To be able to set your own payout thresholds, plus a more detailed payout section that will display more reliable transaction data and balances.
We have been providing daily cryptocurrency payouts for more than four years now and treat these payouts as a promised and due service for our customers. Your trust and confidence in Genesis Mining is of the utmost importance to us and we understand the frustration with not receiving those payouts. This is why our team is working around the clock to resolve these issues and restore any missing payouts.
Thank you,
Your Genesis Mining Team
