This topic is about p2pool. P2pool is related to multiple currencies, but it is primarily about Bitcoin. As such, I do not think that this topic violates that rule. Note that the rule says "topic", not "post". My reading of the rule is that a post about an altcoin is permitted in this forum if it is relevant to the topic of the thread, and the topic is mostly about Bitcoin Mining.
P2pool has supported mining Litecoin as well as Bitcoin from the same codebase
since 2012. Choosing to start forbidding altcoin posts after 6 years of allowing them is extremely disruptive. If you insist on forbidding them now, we will need to find another forum.
Altcoin P2Pool has grown in significance and popularity relative to Bitcoin P2Pool over the past year, and it will continue to grow in significance as altcoins continue to grow in popularity, adoption, and market capitalization. Such significance, visibility, and popularity were not present before the cryptocurrency boom last year. Recent posts in this thread have hinted at this, as a growing proportion of these posts have been primarily about Litecoin and/or Bitcoin Cash, especially since after you released your jtoomimnet Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash P2Pool forks. So no, this topic has ceased to be mostly about Bitcoin mining.
Also, P2Pool did not support Bitcoin Cash until you released your BCH P2Pool fork.
It would therefore be more prudent and more beneficial to have discussions regarding altcoin P2Pool moved to the altcoin board, which is the proper place for such discussions and where such discussions are allowed to be more focused and more thorough. It would also allow this current thread to be more focused and more thorough when discussing the various aspects of Bitcoin P2Pool.
I understand that the underlying codebase may have far-reaching similarities between the different coins that P2Pool supports. In such cases where a post would cover both Bitcoin and altcoins, it would then be simply a case of posting in both threads, with links and/or quotes to/from each thread if necessary, and then distilling further discussions from that point on into their respective threads. It would be like how -ck deals with his ckpool.org and solo.ckpool.org threads.
Also, I'm not forbidding altcoin posts, but merely insisting on having them in the proper designated area.
especially since after you released your jtoomimnet Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash P2Pool forks.
Perhaps there is a misunderstanding here. I did not release "Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash P2pool forks". I only released one fork. That fork was created to allow p2pool to create blocks that were consistently 1 MB (or more) in size, as a fix to
#341. The changes that I made early on in that fork broke p2pool's existing Litecoin compatibility. This prevented me from merging my code back into the p2pool/p2pool github master branch, which in turn forced my fork to remain a fork and forced the mainnet and jtoomimnet p2pool networks to remain separate. So bugs on altcoins affect the BTC pool.
Recently, I unbroke Litecoin compatibility in my code, and allowed people to mine with my code on the mainnet Litecoin p2pool. Unlike BTC, it's the same pool, same network, and 100% compatible with forrestv's legacy code branch. It just has better performance. Soon, once I work out the last few bugs and find the time to do some git wrangling, I will submit a pull request to p2pool/p2pool master which will unify the BTC p2pool networks and get everyone mining into the same BTC pool.
Support for mining Bitcoin Cash is new and unique to my code, but it is also not a fork. It's the same codebase as is used for the jtoomimnet BTC pool. Adding Bitcoin Cash support took 5 commits out of 1775 total commits. It was basically just adding config files for Bitcoin Cash.
Frodocooper, everyone in this thread except you agrees that splitting this into two separate threads -- one for Bitcoin, and one for everything else -- is unnecessary and would make it harder to participate in the p2pool community. Most of the people who have altcoin p2pool nodes also have a BTC p2pool node. Forcing us to use one thread if your node's port is 9327, 9348, or 7903 and a different thread if your node's port is 9332 is silly and arbitrary.
Altcoin P2Pool has grown in significance and popularity relative to Bitcoin P2Pool over the past year, and it will continue to grow in significance as altcoins continue to grow in popularity, adoption, and market capitalization. Such significance, visibility, and popularity were not present before the cryptocurrency boom last year.
This is the core of the issue. Bitcoin's market dominance used to be 95% or more. At that time, it might have made sense to segregate off non-Bitcoin discussions into their own sideshows. Now, Bitcoin's market dominance is only 35%, and so the distinction between Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin has become less important. Nowadays, Bitcoin is just one of many cryptocurrencies. As such, it no longer makes sense to give Bitcoin privileged status.
Splitting the discussion into Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin does not make sense. Moving the discussion entirely into the Altcoin forum doesn't make sense either, as Bitcoin is still the largest p2pool community.
This forum's structure was designed around a hierarchy that no longer exists. This forum topic should perhaps be in a forum titled "Cryptocurrency Mining" to encompass both Bitcoin and Altcoin. Unless you're planning on creating that forum, I suggest you just leave things as they are, since it seems to be working as it is.
Otherwise, we will need to move this discussion to another forum. I have created a thread on forum.bitcoin.com should that prove to be necessary:
https://forum.bitcoin.com/pools/p2pool-decentralized-dos-resistant-trustless-censorship-resistant-pool-t69932.html