Topic: Decentralization Required, Ongoing Problem, Help Needed! (Read 3063 times)

Announcement:


Stamford, CT: Today, CoinCadence.com, a Bitcoin startup focused on mining decentralization and transparency, announced that they have acquired the p2pool.org domain name. p2pool is a decentralized mining pool that creates a peer-to-peer network of miner nodes working together as a mining pool. p2pool is open source and any miner may host their own node and join the pool.

Milk House, LLC’s managing member said, “We have been working with the p2pool mining community to develop the most data-rich and useful p2pool dashboard available at minefast.coincadence.com. With the acquisition of p2pool.org we now have even greater capabilities to promote the growth of p2pool and strengthen the decentralized mining network.”

The company plans a staged roll-out for the new p2pool.org website:

● The existing p2pool.org site will remain as-is until the new site is complete, mining will not be interrupted.

● By September 1st: A fresh home page for p2pool.org explaining the benefits of becoming a p2pool node operator, a public Coin Cadence p2pool node with 0% fee for those that are not able to operate their own node, and links to accredited p2pool resources and guides.

● By November 1st: Open source version of the data-rich Coin Cadence p2pool dashboard released including real time data from p2pool and the Bitcoin blockchain and an API that provides historical data.

We just upgraded our node to a new server in a new data center, this node is blazingly fast:

http://minefast.coincadence.com

With this upgrade comes a big update to our routing system that introduces latency based routing for miners.

What this means is that as we add more p2pool nodes around the globe your miners will always be directed to the closest node, insuring the best efficiency and speed.

I am very concerned by this as well.  How ironic that the movement to decentralize currency needs to decentralize the manufacturing of currency 2.0...

I think what you have revealed here is a clear example of how easily the power and wealth of a few offsets the balance and function of any system.

This isn't about being fair, this is about being sustainable.  And the quicker we move away from comparing BitCoin in value to dollars  and other fiat currency, the more and more I think people will stop trying to make cash on bitcoin and be more reasonable about mining and/or cash exchanging.

I also think more of us need to put some serious efforts into bringing BitCoin into the real world.  No one thought the car would catch on until you started seeing people with them.  People thought the same thing about the TV, the Cell Phone and the computer.  BitCoin is the next logical step in the "things people don't know they need it yet" paradigm.

We need to all go out, tell people about BitCoin, show people the apps and the tools that are already available.  CoinBase has an amazing app for turning any tablet or phone into a payment kiosk, and even allows for tipping!  The beauty of BitCoin is the ability to put a cell phone or tablet in the hands of anyone and give them all they need to start a business.  It is time to move to the next level folks.

This is a good post highlighting mining centralization and helpful countermeasures like P2Pool, but it's a bit misleading.


All Bitcoin transaction processing wouldn't be consolidated to 5 central facilities. Blockchain's hashrate distribution chart shows about 30% is unknown, which I think is healthy. It's probably made up of tinkering solo miners, enterprise miners, less than famous pools etc., which will probably grow.

There may be 5 major/popular pools now but I doubt that will remain. GHash.io wasn't the first pool. That was Slush's Pool, if I'm not mistaken, which now has 3% of the pie slice... 3%. Just as GHash.io entered the picture and ballooned in size so too can other pools. Even now there are 9 pools not including P2Pool.

I think it's worthwhile to try and bolster P2Pool's meager 1% share, but I think we will also see more pools forming. Something they need to do, however, is take inspiration from GHash.io and get their presentation right. This was mentioned on reddit too. Let me make the point.

If you haven't seen the homepage for GHash.io do me a favor and first visit the page for Slush's Pool:

https://mining.bitcoin.cz/

Now visit GHash.io:

https://ghash.io/

It's a fricking mine shaft. No self-respecting male (of which the Bitcoin community is about 80%) would not find that appealing. Note to pool developers & entrepreneurs: you don't have to be first to be biggest. Google wasn't the first search engine. Facebook wasn't the first social network. Presentation and user experience make a difference, and that will probably become more true the more mainstream Bitcoin gets.

I may look into it, maybe even creating a node. Will need to do some research on how P2P pools work.

Was just re-reading the Satoshi White Paper (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf) and found this addressed directly in the conclusion:

I'm lucky to have some free compute on Azure. They have a nice load balancer that can now point to external endpoints. I wonder if we could have something like that automatically load balancing between nodes to ensure uptime. would need to do some testing on that...

if anyone has a company or registered for a business number or is a student I highly recommend trying to get into BizSpark or dreamspark as they both offer free MSDN benefits that include Azure compute credit. It also gives you the option of deploying to many different geographic regions and they offer both windows and Linux vm's.

Load-balanced, zero fee, P2Pool cluster: http://p2pool.io/

I like the idea. 

That said, I'm not sure I can commit to uptime for my node.  Once my host has brought it down for a few hours to migrate it (didn't tell me), and once they were down completely for an hour or so (didn't tell me).  Plus I'm still learning the ropes of running a linux p2pool node.

M

hmm so we currently have a bunch of independent p2pools, what about some kind of co-op venture? Entry requirements would be minimum datacentre spec and server resources as well as all nodes in the co-op would need to be merge mining and paying back those coins to the pool. i.e. the co-op all pays to one set of wallets to be converted and paid back as mdude has already set up.

we can call it co-pool the p2pool co-op that guarantees uptime, security and performance across geographically distributed nodes. (just an idea lol)

Anyway, what say you?

That's what Dogestreet is doing with proxypool. I haven't poked around too much yet, but it would be awesome to have this for bitcoin p2pools too. It would also help a lot of small miners get on p2pools.

Note that I'm not trying to plug my node.  IMHO one node is the same as another, aside from geographical distance.

The one thing that conventional pools have over p2pool is merged mining.  Nodes _can_ merge, but historically the pool ops keep the proceeds to themselves to help pay for operational fees.  That's reasonable, but when it starts turning into a profit making business, it doesn't help the community and doesn't encourage miners to stay on p2pool.

Forgive me if you've seen this before, but I think it's worth repeating.

I think all p2pool nodes should convert their merged mining proceeds (after pool costs if necessary) to BTC and feed them back into p2pool, so essentially all p2pool users are merge mining.  If that's too much a bother for you, I created dedicated addresses you can send the proceeds to (unconverted) and I'll convert them to BTC and redistribute.  I believe someone posted those addresses earlier.

M

I dont see how any of that solves these problems, the specialized equipment, the power consumption, the advantage of industry connections, cooling capacity, you cant stop the consolidation because bitcoin works on the scarcity model like gold, and we all know the golden run.. he who has the gold makes the rules. 

maybe we need a list of nodes running on high quality data centers. my node is on the Microsoft Azure cloud so pretty damned stable and fast.
Using Azure I hope to deploy several nodes around the region being Singapore and Australia. Might do one in the US also just to provide a node out there.

Where are we in most need of high quality nodes?

FYI my p2pool node (see sig) is in LA.  I'm committed for a year, it's on a VPS with plenty of bandwidth.  0% fees, merged mining proceeds go to everyone in p2pool.

But your point of reliable nodes is valid.  That's what backups are for.

Lastly, AFAIK, proxies don't work with p2pool.

M

Nice one OP, I completely agree. I had already decided to push my business (link in sig) to the direction of deploying P2Pool nodes for Bitcoin and others. P2Pool provides some financial incentive, but the other half is the corresponding Bitcoin Core node which is equally important to maintain the global blockchain.

I think much of the problem with P2Pool is that it is still too small and too few reliable nodes. Latency also matters a lot, and really you don't know if the node is just someones extra computer at home, or a professionally hosted server with a business grade Internet pipe. Nodes need to also be geographically close.

So, Seattle area miners, here is our first! (Lots of work going on to update our site, node front ends, etc, a work in progress  ) The plan is to deploy several across the US as a professional pool providor using P2Pool instead of centralized servers (as I don't trust them either! Getting burned by coinex.sw was the last time I mined on a central server).

http://seattle.blockburner.net:9332/static/   Looking at a fee of 1.5%, any donations will be split 50/50 with the P2Pool devs.  (only a single Cube is mining on it from Montana, so the hashrate looks erratic, but if you want to help us test out our server, please do!)


Didn't intend this to be a shameless plug however, centralization of mining and pools is bad, and we need to fix that.



You can use Stratum proxy to get around that usually http://mining.bitcoin.cz/mining-proxy-howto

Or Multiminer can also do this (running an ASICMiner Cube on my P2Pool node above, which uses Getwork by default)

Maybe a naive question here, but would P2P mining work with the getwork protocol? My miners are way outdated but enjoy cheap power so I still use them. 

+1

M

Nice post, even with very low hashing power I've moved to a p2pool node and have made it public on both BTC with merged mining and an ltc node.
Happy to help anyone wanting to setup one or move their miners over to a p2 node.

It would be fascinating then if the centralized pools actually mined on top of p2pool themselves. P2pool could act as a sort of "granularity layer" dividing the block reward hundreds of ways. We would still have a mixture of centralized pools and maybe people mining on top of p2pool themselves directly, but the variance reduction incentive to join a large pool would decline dramatically.