I've posted quite a few times in their thread asking them to remove the references to p2pool. They don't. Thankfully one of the mods (I believe it was -ck) changed their thread title to get rid of the bogus "supporting decentralization" claim it spouted. I completely disagree with dogie's statements about it being a "lost in translation" thing. Bitmain took forrest's code and added some database stuff to it. They didn't create their own implementation, or attempt to fix any of the variance problems. Whatever they did was certainly not the $100,000s effort claimed, and they abandoned it since they realized they didn't know what they were doing.
$100,000's..........
I'd hazard a guess that this is one of the reasons why eleuthria didn't recommend them, & rightly so.
Third post on the antpool thread, by me:
If this is a totally separate p2pool like network but miners connect to Bitmain's servers only to mine on it, then they get the worst of all worlds: They get the increased work loss of frequent restarts, they get the high diff shares that will prevent them getting paid consistently unless they have very large hashrates, and there is no actual decentralisation since they'll be mining at a centralised pool created by bitmain that just happens to use the p2pool code for its backend but isn't really p2peer.
If all of the above is true, then bitmain has tried to cash in on the decentralisation concept by paying homage to the idea using p2pool without actually understanding it.
Fail.
If all of the above is true, then bitmain has tried to cash in on the decentralisation concept by paying homage to the idea using p2pool without actually understanding it.
Fail.
and later on...
I have finally had a skype text chat with the main Chinese Bitmain software engineers and unfortunately it's precisely as I predicted. In principle they wanted to help decentralise and saw p2pool as the obvious way to get involved and would be good publicity for them. Unfortunately they spent a lot of time fixing their regular pool first and just left this announcement up almost as a "preorder for a better p2pool". However they misunderstood the issues with p2pool and thought that all it needed was more coding expertise and manpower contributed to development to fix it and have only just started investigating it now. While they can clearly improve on the existing code - and probably will unless the project gets canned - after I queried them about what solutions they had for the intrinsic p2pool protocol limitations/problems, they had precisely zero valid solutions for them.
And the rest is history...
I've read a lot about this subject throughout the thread, it seems to me that bitmain are actually working against p2pool, despite their claims in their pool thread that they actively support it:
