Topic: [1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool - page 444. (Read 2591964 times)

How do I get the p2pool pages for /users/ /local_stats/ etc looking pleasing instead of lines of word wrapped text?

Also I have the latest version installed and /graphs/ doesn't work telling me "no such resource" is this normal?

Thanks

I pay what I want to forrestv.
P2Pool has a negligible amount of orphans (didn't even find one in the last 200 known p2pool blocks).
I get merged mining with NMC, IXC, DVC (and could add any other merge-able coin I deem worth it).
Variance is only a problem if you don't earn much on p2pool (maybe then it doesn't really matter where you mine). You can actually verify this with merged mined coins: they work OK but as it's solo mining variance is really high and NMC blocks are a rare but nice bonus.
Stales % doesn't matter on p2pool only efficiency and I'm at 100+%.
p2pool pays transaction fees.

And I run it on a DSL line...

I only use centralized pools as backups and really don't see how I would benefit from switching to any of them. Even if I had a whole week of downtime right now on p2pool I still would have earned more than on any theoretical 100% up centralized pool (which actually have downtime when they are DoSed).

By the way, look at the current IXC and DVC difficulty (43% and 64% of BTC difficulty). This means that at least 40% of the miners are merge-mining IXC and 60% are merge-mining DVC (I'm pretty sure nobody is mining these coins expecting a profit unless they are using merge-mining).
Do you think these miners are aware they do mine IXC and/or DVC and get the relevant income?

No : they are mined by centralized pools and most keep the income for themselves and AFAIK don't even tell their miners about it. When you use p2pool you can at least fully control what your hash power is used for.

More hashpower *will* reduce variance on p2pool.  It means more shares, which means more regular payouts.

I've been around since p2pool was a toddler.  I believe the changes made that spike the share difficulty up were to address the issues p2pool had with ASICs.  Now many ASICs work, but if you have small hashpower, you still get extreme variance because getting over that 1m difficulty share with a 15-20% chance of being rejected is hard.

M

More hashpower is never going to reduce the variance compared to other pools.  You may get more shares on p2pool with more hashpower, but you will also get more shares on the other pools with same amount of hashes.  So I imagine you would still complain about "variance" even if you had more hashpower.  Shares on p2pool are far more valuable than other pools.  So in the long term, all other things being equal, it should be a wash, luck playing a big part.  The p2pool difficulty is reflected in the time it takes to generate a p2pool block.  The target being 10 seconds I believe.  The only way to reduce difficulty is to reduce this target time of 10 seconds (or reduce the total hashpower in the pool).  Reducing target time would have other consequences that I'm not sure you would be pleased with.  The effects of latency are already high.  Reducing target time would magnify those, if I understand correctly.  The sensitivity to latencies maybe the underlying cause behind your earlier comment, "p2pool can not be reliably run on a home DSL connection".  Which is not true, at least for me.  Anyhoo, sounds to me like having a constant trickle of payout no matter how small, is important to you.  I would suggest BTCGiuld is the right place for your hashes.

Yes it's forwarded, http://199.83.221.146:9332/static/ should be accessible and I am getting inbound p2pool traffic.

Do you have the ports forwarded? It can take a bit for it to show up on the site.

I'm not following how you value increased variance.  Most people consider variance to be a bad thing.

Decentralization I can understand and agree with.  If I had the hashpower so that the current almost 1 million share difficulty didn't cause huge variance (or p2pool was changed so share difficulty didn't effectively lock out low end miners), and I could run p2pool locally, I would be a p2pool miner (again) as well.  Using a public node defeats the whole purpose of decentralization.

M

I was wondering how to get on this list?  I thought it might auto-populate but that doesn't seem to happen.

http://p2pool-nodes.info/

Wanted to add:
199.83.221.146:9332

Thanks,
-alan

I don't want to convince you, because we value the benefit of mining differently.
Especially the decentralization and variance part.

Also, unless things have changed, p2pool can not be reliably run on a home DSL connection.  That means folks like myself have to use a public node or suffer higher than normal rejects (and normal is high enough thank you!).  That means you have two choices: trust the op of that public node, or get higher rejects.  Both negate two supposed benefits of p2pool.

M

I pay 3% at BTC Guild.  I get paid for orphans, I get merged mining with NMC (impossible on p2pool solo), extremely low variance, 0.2% stales, and transaction fees.

You're going to have a hard time convincing me p2pool is better than that.

M

You could think in p2pool way.
If your good share rate is higher/lower than others in p2pool,
your average income is higher/lower than others in non-p2pool.
Then take low miner fee, tx fee, p2p, and coinbase tx as pros, and higher variance as cons.

The p2pool community.  Last I checked default was 1.5% maybe 2%, I forget.  It's been a while.


Every one I've seen does.  Granted I haven't looked in a while.  

The money comes from pool fees.


The majority that were here 2 years ago are still here.  Those that have proven themselves worthy have a big slice of the pie (BTC Guild..)


Merged mining?  The average person can not successfully solo merge mine.
IXcoin difficulty: 750million
DevCoin difficulty: 972million
NameCoin difficulty: 1.5billion

Even if they could, conventional pools merge mine as well ... certainly no advantage there.

For reference, I'm using BTC Guild.  I get tx fees, I have NMC merged mining (ixc/dvc are worthless), and am paid for orphans.


Um, if average time to share is 4 days ... then it's 4 days.  No exceptions for getting a reject.


You're comparing with others in p2pool.  I'm comparing with non p2pool.

M

EDIT: added difficulties and BTC Guild info.

Question:

With the PPLNS reward, how big is "N"? In other words, how long does someone need to be mining at a constant rate in order to receive their maximum reward for that hash rate?

Thanks.

Frowned upon by whom? There is no pool operator to whom you would be paying fees.


Very few pools pay transaction fees, merged mine for the benefit of the miner, and don't charge a fee. It costs money to run a pool, where do you think that money comes from?


You don't know with certainty who is untrustworthy until after they have been discovered to be untrustworthy (or incompetent). As you say the risk of being cheated is there, so the "expected" earnings are lower, even if the adverse event hasn't happened yet.


The higher expected earnings come from the combination of no fees, paying tx fees, merged mining, reduced orphan risk with p2pool, and no risk of cheating by the pool operator.


It doesn't really work that way. 80% of the time your share will be accepted! All this means is that instead of a 4 day average time (if that is the number), you have a 5 day average share time.


These rejects don't mean the same thing. If the pool average is 19% (I didn't realize it was that high) and your reject rate is 19% then you haven't lost any earnings at all.  You are on par with all the other pool members so when it comes time to divide up the blocks you will get your proportional share.

Though if you have to choose one, I would definitely get the p2pool host on ethernet. Both would be best, but it's slightly less important for the miners.

What you say is true, except it really doesn't equate to "higher expected earnings".  Yes you can use p2pool with 0 fees, but last I checked, it's frowned upon.  Most, if not all pools, now pay transaction fees.  And risk of being cheated by a pool is there, but slim.  Most pools are well established, we know who is trust worthy and who isn't.


Again, there is no higher expected earnings, unless you purposely choose not to "donate" to forrest.


That's like saying if you aren't mining, it's the same as getting a reject.  Not sure what your point is?  The pool right now is at 19% rejects.  You can say all you want about "something wrong with your setup", just realize it's everyone's setup, and certainly not mine, since I'm not in p2pool.  

I stand by my statement, high reject rate increases variance.  If that precious share rejects after my 4 day average time to find a share, then, on average, it's going to be another 4 days before I get another chance.  And then, there's a 19% chance it'll reject too!  "normal" pools average around 2% reject rate.   That means my chances of getting a reject are 9.5x higher on p2pool than on a conventional pool.  How does that not increase variance?

M

I would get rid of all of it & go wired. Mining over wifi is notorious for causing errors/problems, it's the weakest link & by removing it you are eliminating it as the cause of your problem.

You get more variance. Full stop. P2pool has higher variance than other pools. The compensation is higher expected earnings from no pool fees, payout of transaction fees, and no risk of being cheated by the pool.

The question most of us are asking is whether it makes sense to make it an absolute priority to minimize variance. There is no objective answer, but in real terms the variance for a small miner who expects to pull $2/day at current difficulty is not "large" or "extreme." It is large relative to earnings, but the earnings are tiny, and so is the variance. Even then, it has been explained that you will be getting payouts at that tiny hash rate about 50% of the time. Not too bad.

The main thing you get by focusing intensely on minimizing variance is a nice pretty graph of flat payouts. If that is really important enough to you that you are willing to forgo higher expected earnings, go for it. No one can say objectively that's the wrong thing to do, but we can question it.

BTW, the reject rate doesn't really increase variance though, it just (slightly) reduces the share rate. A share that is rejected is exactly the same as a share that you never found. Other than that the high rejects might be telling you there is something wrong with your setup.

Which link?  

Miners to p2pool
bitcoind to world

I have run the miners locally on the Mac Mini and both bitcoind and p2pool, that did seem to make a difference on the timeouts.

From forrestv response, the ReplyMatcher timeouts are between bitcoind and p2pool.  So WiFi should not effect, I guess.

My latency and efficiency seem within norms so may be the ReplyMatcher timeouts are just noise.