Bitcoin network
* Increase SHARE_PERIOD (average time between shares) from 10 seconds to 30 seconds, in order to make it more fair for high-latency miners (read: ASICs)
Will this increase the sharechain from 1 day to 3 days?
I was planning on keeping it the same for now. The only disadvantage a long sharechain has is making P2Pool take a long time to start up and download shares, along with increased memory usage.
I'm rather happy with all the changes, except this one. Going from 10 seconds/share to 30 seconds/share, but without also increasing the sharechain length, means that there will be much fewer paid shares per found block.
24 hours at 10 seconds each = 8640 shares. At 30 seconds each = only 2880 shares.
I have a rather slow node (only one Eurupter, it does 320 MH/s), so I have to be pretty lucky to squeeze in my shares during the 24 hour window of opportunity, otherwise they expire unpaid. When the block was found recently, my node was pretty far down on the list. Under these new rules, I might not be on the list at all.
That takes away one of the big reasons to do shared pool mining: consistent and steady payouts over time, instead of having to play the lottery for a rare big payout.
Please reconsider?
Is there a problem now with the payout being spread too thin? I didn't think there was. If that is a problem, then there would be reason to reduce the shares per block. Otherwise, since you're already doing a hard fork, now would also be a great time to also stretch the sharechain to 3 days, instead of 1 day, which would keep the number of paid shares per block the same.
Josh