Topic: [1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool - page 760. (Read 2591916 times)

Then it wont happen

To satisfy my OCD. Do you need a better reason?

This is a TL;DR but anyone interested ...

The reality of it is that you need to understand what's happening and ignore the comments like "I get this amount so it's OK" or "I get his amount and it sux" that clearly don't understand what to expect (since those comments are meaningless)

The pool gets blocks with variance.

The variance is a multiplying factor on the expected time to get a block.
e.g. a 300GH/s pool would expect to get 4.0313724038696 blocks a day on average with the current difficulty

What that means of course is it would expect to get a block on average every 5hr 57min 11.907sec

I'm not going to attempt to calculate the expected variances/standard deviations but however point out examples of big pools getting large variances for finding a block.

DeepBit got a block about a week ago at 824% of the expected shares.
You see high % every few weeks on DeepBit.
Yesterday 3-Mar they got a daily average of about 200% for ALL blocks that entire day.

What this means is of course is that those sort of number are not to be considered improbable.

So firstly, the P2Pool could get a block at 800% of the expected share rate - or 1day 23hr 37min 35.259sec
It happens some times, get used to the idea it will happen as it does for everyone.
It also happens some times that blocks appear in a few seconds or a few minutes.
That's the results of using a pseudo-random function to find blocks.

However ... then there is the next step and that is the probability of you finding a share.
Lets just assume that it is currently 500difficulty to find a share.
That means that at 800mh/s you would expect (on average) to find a share every 44 minutes 44.35 seconds
However, you can find a share in a few seconds or even 800% of that (5 hours 57 minutes 54.8 seconds)
You have exactly the same variance issue as any pool or any person has finding a block.

The bit that seems to be ignored or misunderstood a lot is that the variance is applied to your expected time.
If your expected time is 1 hour than it could take 8 hours for you to find a share.
If your expected time is 10 minutes then it could take 80 minutes for you to find a share.

The variance is a multiplier and thus seems to really suck if you have a low hash rate and are unlucky ... but the reality is that you should expect both good and bad luck to happen since it is random.
(and don't forget it is also a multiplier on the pools expected block finding rate)

Bottom line, with a low hash rate you can expect your share of the 49.25+trn of each block to be VERY unstable.
But over a long time it should get close to the expected value.
The effect of variance on you is better than solo mining but worse than 1 difficulty pool mining.

I mine with ~600 MH/s fairly effectively. I usually get about 0.1 BTC per block.

so the only type of miner that should mine at p2pool are people with alot of hash power. is it even worth it to mine 800mh/s here

p2pool uses 2 types of shares: the ones you are seeing in CGminer are only used for estimating hashrate, and are a much lower difficulty than actual p2pool share. The high difficulty shares are what are added to the chain, and determine payment.

one thing i dont get is that i have been mining here for a few days now. I have been getting alot of shares in the cgminer window but in the p2pool window i have hardly received any shares

Why?

I'm so sorry for spreading an inaccuracy. Is there a way I can control the work splitting behavior, or is it only managed automatically? I wish to have cgminer always split work across my GPUs, especially on p2pool. Can I force-enable this as an option?

Although if he's been mining for a week, I'd say the estimate should not be that low unless he has been really unlucky.

What's your stale rate / efficiency look like? If those are good, then just trust the Miner hashrate and wait for better luck 

Why, those blocks are blocks I found not p2pool shares. I would like to continue my luck. I got 1.25 BTC extra bonus from these blocks. 

Miner = actual hashrate.
p2pool = estimate of hashrate based on shares delivered (subject to share level variance)
p2pool.info = estimate of hashrate based on the shares 24 hours (won't be accurate until at least 24 hours of mining).

Been mining with p2pool for about a week or so and am finally feeling comfortable with this new approach to mining. 

First off, great piece of software ckolivas (sent you Pi BTC) the community needs this balance/honesty.

So I'm a bit confused about my MH/s rate.  P2Pool software claims 3800 - 4000MH/s (tailing log), the additive of my miners (cgmier) claims about 3700MH/s and p2pool.info claims as low as 1.72GH/s.  What's to believe?  I've been reading the long thread here for weeks before making the plunge and understand about the stales and efficiency as reported by cgminer, but I could not find a solid answer for this discrepancy. 

In any event, p2pool has all my hashes from now on...a great idea that's well implemented.

You should upgrade your bitcoind to support P2SH!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.6.0/test/

Thanks =)

I really appreciate your work ckolivas!! CGMiner is AWESOME! Congrat!!! 

This is not remotely true. The only time you may have difficulty getting enough work is immediately after a longpoll, and that is precisely when cgminer splits work. Furthermore, with p2pool, your local p2pool node can generate enough work for 100s of GPUs and cgminer is not remotely a rate limiting component.

Thank you.

Notice: The protocol switchover happens in 9 hours. If you haven't upgraded to the latest P2Pool, you should do so now. The first post has binaries for 0.9.2.

A few errors ending like this are expected 1 hour after the switch time, since there will inevitably be a few nodes that haven't upgraded:

2012-02-26 02:31:41.256425 >     raise ValueError('old share an hour after switch time')
2012-02-26 02:31:41.256481 > exceptions.ValueError: old share an hour after switch time

Any node that sends invalid shares is banned from connecting to you for an hour as of P2Pool version 0.9.1. This will minimize the impact of un-upgraded peers by splitting them off from the main P2Pool network.

You can see the recent luck on the p2pool.info stats page.  You can determine what any miner made by doing simple math with those values and any bitcoin mining calculator.

For example, a 1GH/s miner would earn 0.67 BTC/day if they have no variance.  You can see that p2pool has been unlucky recently and in the last 7 days, the pool has found about 65% of the blocks that would have been expected if the pool had no variance.  So that 1GH/s miner would actually have made 0.67 BTC/day * 0.65 = .4355 BTC/day over the past 7 days.

Of course on weeks that p2pool is lucky, the pool will find more blocks than expected if there were zero variance and that miner would make more than 0.67 BTC/day. 

Over a long period of time, the good weeks will tend to offset the bad weeks, etc.