Curious about the coinbase in p2pool blocks
Most I've seen have been 0000 (i.e. almost nothing)
They are easy to spot though coz they pay in the coinbase txn (and don't say Eligius in the coinbase itself
)
But this one: 165558 (00000000000007d5f9d3a5bd7d9d184f31df65b6c185433504452bcb0d9c8bcb)
Was: coinbase (44) : fabe6d6d2184daf786691909635b7684622b478c3489abe4888195feca7274e3ae5953570100000
000000000
(..mm!....i..c[v.b+G.4........rt..YSW........)
Which looks like MM - but there doesn't appear to be an NMC block at exactly 02:55:57 6-Feb-2012 UTC (0x4f2f413d)
So ... out of curiosity ... what is that in the coinbase?
It can't be MM coz there would be nowhere to actually pay it ... would there?
(and how would it get in there anyway)
That was a merged mining header and became Namecoin block
http://explorer.dot-bit.org/b/2184daf786691909635b7684622b478c3489abe4888195feca7274e3ae595357 (notice how the block's hash in the url appears 4 bytes into the MM header.) The Bitcoin block header's timestamp doesn't have to match Namecoin's.
So I'm running two p2pool nodes. One is on the same subnet as my miner and the other is running on my residential connection as a backup pool.
They are both setup with the same versions of everything and both on the lastest git head and both are merged mining with namecoind (I like the new simpler flags btw)
My main instance output this
2012-02-06 14:28:36.710654 New work for worker! Difficulty: 1.235214 Share difficulty: 357.877941 Total block value: 50.011230 BTC including 43 transactions
and at almost the same time, my backup output this
2012-02-06 14:28:35.523973 New work for worker! Difficulty: 0.999985 Share difficulty: 349.760460 Total block value: 50.010530 BTC including 29 transactions
2012-02-06 14:28:37.032823 New work for worker! Difficulty: 0.999985 Share difficulty: 357.877941 Total block value: 50.010530 BTC including 29 transactions
Any ideas why my backup pool has different numbers for everything? And why did the backup pool output 2 different lines with "New work?" The second line has the same share difficulty as my main instance, but the difficulty, block value and number of transactions aren't the same. Both nodes to show the same number of shares in the chain and the same pool hash rate and stale rate.
Both bitcoind's relay are connected to eachother, so I thought the number of transactions should be very close to the same. 43 and 29 seems like a big difference.
The share difficulties match, which is expected. The reason that there's two is that there was a new P2Pool share produced in between them. The local difficulty is different because it automatically changes so that P2Pool isn't swamped with shares from your miners. Total block value and transactions depends on which transactions your bitcoind has heard of.
