Hi looks interesting and I was looking at using P2Pool or P2Pool based pool once I get my ASIC's. The one thing I don't understand is how you get your other merged-mined coins apart from BTC. Sorry if I've not read it proper.
Yeah that is going to be the hard part.
Really the plan was never to try to give everyone all the types of coins. Originally, in line with the old version of the DeVCoin pool bounty, the plan was to pay out only in DeVCoins, converting all the other types of coin into DeVCoins for that purpose.
Now that the "must pay out only in devcoins" requirement for the bounty has gone, I have set it up to send out all the bitcoins as bitcoins automatically mainly because that ensures instant payouts for the bitcoin part of it, hopefully "buying time" for figuring out the technical details of how to figure out how many of all the other types of coins that same hashing either did mine or statistically on average would have mined.
Another factor here too is a recent thread in this subforum claiming that merged mining altcoins along with bitcoins is not actually paying pool miners as much as they get at a bitcoins-only pool. So I also had in mind that as long as I pay out at least as much as, and hopefully more than, the pool that chap was claiming to be so profitable, miners should be well pleased.
I would prefer to pay the altcoins reward in DeVCoins, partly because promoting DeVCoin is the original motivation for the pool and partly because DeVCoin addresses are exactly the same as bitcoin addresses, so that I can simply send people DeVCoins to the exact same address their bitcoins get sent to.
I am still trying to figure out the best way to actually compute or tally the amount the altcoin mining adds up to. I had an idea that ZI could look in the bitcoin blockchain to see how much bitcoin a miner earned and compute from that, but it occurs to me now that maybe they could p2pool mine at other pools using the same bitcoin address there and it would not be possible to see from the blockchain how much of their mining was done here thus also applicable to the altchains. So the method of figuring out the altcoin part is still not really finalised.
The fact that I am charging NO COMMISSION on the bitcoins hopefully by itself makes up for a lot; that alone might make just the bitcoin payouts alone come to more than what a miner would make at many other pools.
Another goal of the Massively Merged Mining project is to try to get so much hashing power running that it will be possible for all the chains that went into hiding mode when people started attacking merged mine altchains isntead of using merged mining as intended, to support merged altchains, to come out of hiding. The value reports on those, online at
http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html show they are doing well enough that adding them to the merged mining mix should turn out to be quite worthwhile, though it will also add to the complexity of calculating mining rewards.
I was actually tempted by the thread about merged mining pools not paying as much as a bitcoin-only pool to make it really simple and just pay per share more than any other pool, as that would eliminate the need to actually figure out how much the the merge actually brings in. But, pay per share is maybe not such a great way to pay, being too easy to cheat, and in any case p2pool doesn't pay that way.
If there is strong resistance/objection to receiving the altchains portion of miner awards as DeVCoins, I guess the other method would be for each miner to pick one altcoin they want their altchain awards to be paid in.
-MarkM-