Heya, folks. I've been reading up as much as I can, and I think I know the answer to this question, but I thought I'd ask just to be sure.
I run my own little bitcoin p2pool node on my home network, and I have four mining rigs/devices pointed at it -- 5GH, 5GH, 20GH, and 200GH. Right now, all four use the same bitcoin address as their username. However, I'd like to track the work, results, and payouts of each one separately. If I assign each rig its own unique payout address, would that cause my earnings to go down?
My guess is yes, since if one of the 5GH rigs gets a share, it "counts" for or earns less than if the 200GH rig found that share. On the other hand, if the 200GH rig gets a share, the payout of the 5GH rig would effectively be zero.
Any clarification would be appreciated. Thanks.
You will earn as much, but you will get more transactions.
When you use them to transfer BTC to another address the difference will be in the amount of fees requested : the more transactions received for a given amount, the more fees you'll have to pay to spend this amount.
As long as your incoming transactions are above 0.01 BTC you'll have to spend less than 1% of them to use them (in the extreme case this is known as the dust effect : below 0.0001 BTC your transactions will have to pay more fees than you actually pay to the destination).
So I wouldn't use anything below a 100GH/s miner on p2pool right now without aggregating its hashrate with other miners.
Back to your actual need: you don't have to use different payout addresses Use a default payout address on p2pool (-a parameter) and use a name to connect your miner to the p2pool node instead of the payout address. This will show you stats for each miner under its name and still pay all of your income to a single address (avoiding any dust-like effect when you use your p2pool's income).