Topic: [1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool - page 403. (Read 2591964 times)

Much more fun solomining Terracoin than Btc with p2pool - up to 5 blocks/day with 120GH 

Im in a hurry.

Sigh. I'm getting so tired of arguing with math fallacies. So I won't.

While you're technically correct, I would contend that to the average user, his "pseudo experiment" is a pretty good indicator of his profitability, delta his very short term luck.  I understand the math behind this, and why this is wrong in the greater scheme of things. I know about variance, and about short term spikes (or dips!) in luck, and all the good stuff about p2pool and why it's better for a decentralized network than other alternatives.

But here's the thing - all of that is irrelevant to Joe Blow Miner. I have X GH/s of mining power.  If I point them at p2pool, or at GHash.io, or at Slush's, or at any other pool, I'm still "supporting the network", so long as I'm cautious about fraudulent pools or ones approaching 40% or more of the network.  The differentiating factors then become ease of use and profitability.

I'm pretty sure we can all agree that running your own p2pool node is a lot more complex than just typing in a URL into your miner. Using someone else's node is the same as any other pool.

So let's look at profitability. The common refrain when users complain about uneven payouts from p2pool is that it will all average out over the long term. This is not a useful answer to a user who's burning electricity for (what seems like) no gain. An answer of "wait a few months" is not going to sway the user. We need a better answer.

The thing is, while variance may average out over the long term, that only matters if difficulty remains the same.  If you think that I'm wrong, let me offer you a scenario. Hypothetically, let's say that based on current pool hashrate and network difficulty, we can expect one block per day. I'll offer you a choice. You can get three months of double the expected block success (two blocks per day initially), followed by three months of zero payouts. OR, you can get three months of zero payouts, followed by three months of double the expected success rate.  

The naive answer is that both will average out to the same thing - and that answer is correct so long as the pool maintains the same hashrate and block difficulty throughout the six months. In reality, even if we hold the pool hashrate constant over six months, your total payouts with the two options will be radically different due to the increasing difficulty rate. The double payouts followed by a dry spell will earn much more than a dry spell followed by double payouts, simply because you're getting paid when difficulty is lower - thus more blocks are found during a given time period.

And that doesn't even take into account the reduced pool hashrate that will result from a three-month dry spell.

So the short answer is the same it's always been: we need to find a way to make p2pool more attractive to users. That in turn will increase our chance of finding a block in a reasonable time, reduce the variance, and increase profitability for everyone. And yes, I realize the catch-22 inherent in what I just wrote.

Kano:  if you know ckolivas and you developed cgminer together, I'm assuming I don't know, but why was he not saying those things to me? 

What would you do differently if you were me?  That'll help me understand better.

I have no care/consideration for what Bitcoin represents?  HUH??

You are a cgminer developer?   Please explain your ethical position to me.  I do not understand why you think I am abusing the Bitcoin network by simply mining on it.     

Which requires ... every 2016 blocks ... to increase your hash rate by the % the difficulty goes up.

Which requires ... every 2016 blocks ... to increase your electricity usage ... and thus increase the $ amount to cover it.

Which requires ... every day you convert BTC to $ ... to increase or decrease your hash rate by the change in the BTC <-> $ exchange rate.

But in reality, the issue is that you seem to have stated, is that you are only mining BTC to cash it out.
You have no care or consideration for what BTC represents, how it can be used to the advantage of BTC and what it may be worth in the future.
So ... I don't really see the point of caring what pool you mine on ...

When I look at my log, I don't see anything like that.  I have, however, seen that fffffffffffff thing, when my Win8 computer for some reason goes offline.  I was mining wireless on it the last 2 days with cgminer and I'm not sure if I had the right drivers installed via Zadig.    If you have 0 hashrate, maybe you're not connected? Just a thought

So, I'm in the process of writing on Stratum client, and I'm getting some odd results from p2pool.

In the p2pool log, I'm seeing a ton of these:


I've tried reading through p2pool's source, but Python isn't my thing and the code doesn't appear well structured IMHO. So, it was hard for me to tell if "target" referred to:

a) A Bitcoin block target - unlikely
b) A p2pool share - my first thought
or
c) A difficulty 1 (or x) share - my fear

My first guess was B, as my transactions with P2Pool have looked like this:


And P2Pool's response:


So, it appears to be giving me a thumbs up, and my miner is happily mining away. Unfortunately if I visit http://localhost:9332 in my browser, it reports my local rate as 0. Thusly why I'm starting to fear C 

Any thoughts? I hope I made sense of that all.

Thanks!  How do I apply this kernel patch on your site, the linux 3.13?   I'm on Ubuntu 13 and I have this kernel:  3.2.0-59-generic-pae

Would that patch even work on my system?  Just curious, I just saw your site and thought I'd ask.   

Easy then, throw everything at p2pool.

Honestly, I'd much rather help decentralization. 

I can't tell you how to set your priorities of mining. My suggestion was just a way to reduce variance while still helping p2pool and the decentralization of the overall bitcoin network. If you want more steady payouts, put more on the bigger pools, if you want to help decentralization, put more on the smaller pools (and especially p2pool). But either way you can still accomplish both goals to a large extent.

I have got 2 Antminer S1's now and other stuff, so I have 510 GH/s power.   When my new miner gets here in the next 2 days, another 60 GH/s BFL and another Antminer S1, I will have about 770 GH/s full power.     Right now, I have 26 GH/s on p2pool and the remaining 500 GH on Slush. 

I was planning on putting the new Antminer I'm getting soon on p2pool and the 60 somewhere else.  Do you think I should divide them up differently?   

Assuming you have more than one miner, divide up your hash rate. Keep some of it on p2pool and get what you get, while some of it is on lower variance pools for steady payouts.

Just as an aside,  you guys may be surprised to hear this, but I was fired from my job of 10 years at a hospital last summer and I live on Bitcoin only.   I am not looking just to make a bunch of money, I am simply looking to survive.  I am done (hopefully) with working for "the man."  I'm willing to listen, learn and do what is best for p2pool - not my profits.  I just want a steady income ($1736/mo) to live on!  That honestly folks is all I want!  And some weeks it gets scary because my little payments don't amount to much.  My problem is, and the people like me out there who are mining, we end up switching back to Slush for the dependable $25-$35 payouts from say 300-500 GH/s, because I receive them fairly rapidly.   I do this out of necessity.  Anyone know of a place where I'd be better of parking my miners for a stable $1700/mo?  I'm not sure, that's why I'm on here learning & talking.  I'm in this for the long haul, my name is Marlon, so if any other serious miners out there wanna talk, I'm here!  I have one running p2pool node now and another node on a Win8 computer in the other room.  I've got 2 more miners on the way but my power bill is now about $175-$250/mo, whereas before it was rarely over $150.   So i'm paying a bit more in power, but it is manageable even with no job!  I make enough to cover the bills, but yeah I guess we are all trying mining out for different reasons.  I am not overtly suspicious of others, I just don't trust the NSA or government because they obviously hate democracy & don't care about us.  I just wanna make enough to live on here (not extra profits unless it's just a nice bonus).  So I'm here, if anyone comes up with ideas, I can implement them on my end, maybe we can do something to change some things about this situation.  Maybe we won't be able to, but I'm gonna try!! 

What he said, especially the part I bolded.

I do my own calculations using my MPoolMonitor.  Using the API from blockchain.info, I get the timestamp off of the last block before the diff changed, and the timestamp of the most recent block.  Subtract the first timestamp from the second timestamp, convert to minutes, and divide that by how many blocks have been solved.  That comes out to 8.89 minutes a block right now.  Use 10/8.89 as your ratio to get estimated next difficulty, the time of the change, and the percentage increase.  Of course don't use rounded numbers for the math, just for display.

M

The simple fact is that most miners are a combination of lazy, fickle, uninformed and just all round suspicious and seem to be unable to understand payout schemes, variance and luck no matter how much it's explained to them, and their care factor for things like security of the network, distributing the hashrate etc. etc. just isn't high enough to offset the fact that the primary thing they care about is profits. Then they do pseudo experiments ignoring all the things I said above and show a better payout at some random other pool for that day and they're lost for good.

I've been watching the pool hashrate for several days now.  On 04/09, it was at 201 TH/s, and 4/10 at 2 am CST, it was 214 TH/s.  Right now it's at 126 TH/s.   I think people are jumping ship, but won't that just create a huge variance payout for the ones left behind?  What can we do to make p2pool more efficient?  Are there any ideas?  I don't understand how it works enough to say.  I'm not giving up, I'm staying on p2pool indefinitely.   I'm thinking something else is wrong, some kind of configuration problem maybe?  The expected numbers on the block list are so high after a found block the day before.  I've tweaked latency issues on my own computer, and I get about 92% consistently to maybe 97% efficiency.  And I run nothing else but p2pool and BTC wallet. 

I've found this estimate to be pretty reliable, which shows 17.4% now: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Of course we will find out in a few days. Whatever it is, it won't be good for p2pool.