Transcoder Campaign: 0x525 - with Telegram Bot

[vires-in-numeris]

Hi community!
I’ve been following the project for a while now and also took part in the merkle-mine distribution. A few rounds ago, I’ve decided to set up my own transcoder since I was getting tired of the stealthy reward cut increases of the reliable transcoders. And by switching to the low reward cut transcoders, I’ve experienced some missed rounds.

That’s why I’m offering you a reliable & low reward cut transcoder!

Bond to the 0x525 transcoder here:
0x525419ff5707190389bfb5c87c375d710f5fcb0e

• Reward cut: Set at 0.25% - Update 31.03.19: Lowered to 0.2%

• Reliable: The transcoder is running with it’s own geth node and several monitoring scripts.
  And it’s not only for my peace of mind: Join the 0x525 Telegram Channel https://t.me/transcoder and get notified by a bot when the transcoder claims the rewards!
  This is fully automated - as soon as the transcoder claims the reward, you’ll get an instant notification with some information and the transaction link:
  

Of course, you will also get notified on any reward cut changes or if the reward call is late (currently set to >500 blocks after the new round started).

So far, my transcoder is up since round 1263 and has been running without any problems.

Feel free to comment if you have any questions or feature requests for the notification bot! You can also find me on the livepeer discord channel.

Thank you!

[vires-in-numeris]

Sorry for the double post but since I’m a new forum user, I was only allowed to post one picture - so here is an example of a notification if the reward call is late:

(was just for testing, the warning will only be triggered if the call is >500 blocks late and will be resent every 2 hours)

Bond to the 0x525 transcoder here:
0x525419ff5707190389bfb5c87c375d710f5fcb0e
Join the Telegram Channel:

Transcoder 0x525

[dob]

I really like the “warning” feature if reward hasn’t been called in 500 blocks. Have you considered open sourcing the code for the bot so others could configure it for their own nodes?

[vires-in-numeris]

As already caught by my Transcoder Watcher bot, I have lowered the reward cut of my transcoder to 0.2% - the lowest reward cut currently available for stakers.

[Arnon]

0xB955DB051Bf09a645c26730752E28F5E3776088F

[vires-in-numeris]

I thought it was time for a short stats update and a big thank you: Currently, over 100k LPT are bonded to my transcoder and I’ve been active since 60 rounds - with 100% reliability:

A big thanks to all the stakers/bonders for their support!

[mike7791p]

It looks like you missed a round on 4/9/2019 at 8:44:03 AM. How did this happen and how will you prevent this from happening in the future?

[vires-in-numeris]

Hey Mike, thank you for your interest!

I have not missed any rounds so far
You can use my telegram bot https://t.me/TranscoderWatcher_bot to check the history of my transcoder by typing “history 0x525419ff5707190389bfb5c87c375d710f5fcb0e”:

Additionally, you can find the transaction link to every round in my Telegram channel: https://t.me/transcoder

If you meant round 1308 with April 9th, here’s the transaction link: https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7dde3e6c1c4ddabcb8537190b8ac6ecd53de9ce16d2bebffbeca9c3ab23a98a5
So I did claim the rewards, but it was late by a few hours (every transcoder has ~24h time to claim the rewards). If I remember correctly, it was due to a geth crash (had to update and resync and that took some time). As far as preventing missing any rounds: That’s what I built the transcoder watcher bot for So I’ll get notified if my reward call is late and can check/solve if there’s a problem.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!

[vires-in-numeris]

My 0x525 Transcoder is now live since 100 rounds!
Even more important: It has not missed a single round since --> 100% Reliability!

Also, we’re approaching 200k in staked LPT

A huge thanks to all the stakers for their support!

[melvyn2796]

Hey there vires-in-numeris!

Have been bonded with 0x525 transcoder for about 2 weeks now and I would say I am impressed with the reliability of the transcoder while having such an attractive reward cut.

Would love to hear iabout any updates (or future updates) to the transcoder (last post here is May 19, but of course considering the fact that the forums is kinda “inactive”).

Also realised that the Telegram bot is kind of dead, would love to see the bot come back online again.

[videoDAC]

I miss the bot too.

It was becoming like the visible and audible heartbeat of the Livepeer protocol.

[vires-in-numeris]

Alright, time for an update

First of all sorry for not being that active in the community for the past few months - I’ve been very busy with other projects. But of course I’ve been keeping up with the Livepeer development and made sure that my transcoder was running smoothly.

0x525 has been live for 347 rounds and did not miss a single reward call!

Now regarding streamflow:

• I just did the update and 0x525 is ready for streamflow

• I have decided to use CPU transcoding for now. I’m currently not running a miner and would therefore need to invest a considerable sum into a GPU & server setup. So I need to see some adoption first in order to better calculate if the investment will pay out. For the next few months, I think the LPT rewards will still pay way more than transcoding rewards. But I’m actively looking for viable solutions (like for example a nvidia jetson).

• I have increased the reward cut to a more reasonable 1.2%. This is because the LPT inflation and therefore the rewards have gone down significantly (and also the LPT price…). I want to use those rewards to invest in a decent GPU transcoding setup in the near future. At 1.2% I’m still offering one of the lowest reward cuts - at 100% reliability over 317 rounds.

And lastly the Transcoder Watcher Bot: I will still be quite busy for a month or so - but I will open source it. And it would be great if somebody could update the bot for streamflow (or take the idea of the bot and build something from scratch, since the code is quite a mess ).

Thank you all for your continuous support & happy streamflow release!

[vires-in-numeris]

Hey all!
Due to the constantly high gas prices during the recent weeks (claiming the rewards costs $2-4) combined with the shrinking LPT staking returns, I’ve increased the reward cut from 1.2% to 2.4%.
Thank you for understanding!

[vires-in-numeris]

Another quick update:

First, I’ve updated the transcoder/orchestrator to the newest version as soon as it came out.

But more interesting - I’ve been getting transcoding jobs (and winning tickets) for 3 days in a row now! Each ticket was worth ~0.03 ETH - looking at my CPU monitoring, this was for only ~2 hours of transcoding per ticket! And I’m sharing 75% of those earned fees with my stakers, that’s the highest sharing percentage by far from all the top orchestrators.

Also, the CPU usage was averaging at only ~50% during the transcoding, so there’s still plenty of room for more concurrent streams. So as an early conclusion, it seems that CPU transcoding is perfectly fine for now (assuming you have a decent, modern CPU ofc).

[vires-in-numeris]

First the good news: Transcoding is going really well. I’ve earned almost 1.5 ETH in fees already, considerably more than most other transcoders/orchestrators!

Now the bad news: We need to talk about fees… the gas prices are crazy high at the moment, resulting in very costly reward calls. The last two cost me $80 each, while receiving only ~$25 in LPT. Obviously this is not sustainable… I will therefore increase my reward cut to 8% (to break even on gas costs vs LPT rewards, not including server & maintenance costs…)
Please not that this is only temporary and I’ll decrease the cut again once we’re back to normal gas price levels (or if the reward call mechanics are reworked).

At the same time, I have to increase my fee cut. As mentioned on discord and here in the forum, I’m currently losing ETH with a fee cut of only 25%.
As an example the latest fee returns: A ticket value of 0.13 ETH -> I’m sharing 75% of it and keeping only 0.0325 ETH. But I’m paying 0.0845 ETH for the transaction itself… Until this is reworked or the gas prices come down, I’m forced to increase the fee cut to 65% (again, this is ~break even for me in terms of gas costs).

Thank you for understanding and for staking with me

[vires-in-numeris]

Hey all,

The cost for claiming the rewards were ~$12/day on average for the last week. As promised, I will therefore lower the reward cut again: From 8% down to 4%. (Transaction)
This once again means that my Orchestrator offers one of the lowest reward cuts of the top transcoders - combined with the fastest growing fees from transcoding (currently at 2.4 ETH).

Thank you for staking with me!