Well, if a stale share happens to be a block, it is technically an orphan block, so this is still an increase in the orphan rate, depending on how you count it (maybe orphan blocks which are known to be orphaned when the pool receives them are not counted).
Agreed. So both situations actually affect p2pool negatively. Assuming that the average p2pool node has lower bandwidth and lower connectivity than a big pool, it will generally receive blocks and send out new blocks slower, resulting in more orphans overall.
Yeah... I think... and, I wasn't around in the early days, not beginning to mine until the last quarter of last year, so, dunno about the early intentions of bitcoin... but...
When it was designed, I think the intention was for individual peers mining individually. Not sure if pooled mining was the intent from the start. (I'm sure I'll be corrected on this if I'm mistaken
)
So, a higher level of orphaned blocks, when scaled up to a lot of peers, may have been an expected metric, and considered the normal situation. Perhaps P2Pool's orphan rate, better reflects the way this would have been, without the centralization of mining?
What the centralized pools did, was cut out the latency from when found blocks, propagated to the other people mining. Since they would inform the mining peers more or less, simultaneously, it would have the effect of near-instant propagation among a large number of peers. Since none of them would have to sanity-check the block against their own blockchain, avoiding the latency that would come with it while distributing it, and not having to pass it along to the next set of peers afterwards, you have a large segment of miners abandoning the current block and starting the new one, much sooner than would have been expected, had everyone been solo-mining. This alone, would have eliminated a portion of what would have been a normal orphan rate.
All of those mining peers, on a centralized pool, would be considered collectively, a single bitcoin peer as far as the network is concerned. Take the top 75% of the hashpower on the bitcoin network, and you end up with, what... a few dozen bitcoin peers? Perhaps a little more? Certainly a tiny fraction of all of the individual bitcoin peers that are mining as a whole, by node count.
I don't know how this could be reflected in useful data, but perhaps this has an affect on assumptions of expected levels of good blocks and orphans within a given period of time?
I think what I'm getting down to, is... perhaps instead of looking to the average pool results to find normal, the pool results, should be considered above-normal instead of the baseline, which would be pure solo mining on a more distributed network?
-- Smoov