There is no length that is necessarily guaranteed to be long enough. If you are saying to extend the chain until blocks are found, that is exactly what proportional payout does.
If you are just suggesting to extend the chain to some other fixed length like 7 days or 30 days or something else, that is another story, with its own tradeoffs. For example, even people with large hash rates will see very small payouts for a long time when first starting.
Even 7 days probably won't be long enough soon.
If you are just suggesting to extend the chain to some other fixed length like 7 days or 30 days or something else, that is another story, with its own tradeoffs. For example, even people with large hash rates will see very small payouts for a long time when first starting.
Even 7 days probably won't be long enough soon.
I'm saying let the sharechain grow as large as needed to hold the full PPLNS window size, like all normal PPLNS pools do.
I'm not sure if I'm doing the math right here, but -ln(1.0 - .95) = about 3. So 95% of all blocks should be found within 3 * difficulty shares worth of work. That is, only 5% of shares should result in no payment at all. organofcorti please chime in if I did this wrong.
But if the share chain is capped at 3 days worth of shares regardless of the difficulty of finding a block and regardless of the amount of work stored in the chain, instead of always at N = 3 * difficulty, then the size of N for the PPLNS payment window shrinks and the % of shares resulting in no payment goes up. This doesn't happen in traditional PPLNS pools, N remains fixed and the % from above remains fixed.
Caveat: I don't know the inner workings of how p2pool juggles the share chain size and spread variables to come up with it's minimum share target difficulties.
