Topic: p2pool - Advancement of Decentralized Mining - Vital to Bitcoin Network Security (Read 19412 times)

This isn't the correct place to ask the question. 20GHs isn't worth mining in p2pool node but 100GHs would be good. The minimum hash rate recommended is 40GHs. Remember you will have to detect the electricity & maintenance costs when you calculate estimate profit.
Kindly,
      MZ

Hi, IM new to P2Pool and working out if it is worth using or not, I only have 20ghs at the moment and soon to be 100ghs is it worth using p2pool or should I stick to traditional pools? Also atthe moment I have a time to share of 4.5 days is this normal ?

Is it possible to distinguish a block mined by a P2Pool from one mined by a centralized pool? are any traces left?

Would it be possible to (at some time) accept only blocks mined by p2pools? or least give some incentive?

Another bump for this thread.  So has any of the proposed donations and p2pool suggestions made any progress?

There have been no visible checkins on gitHub for the main p2pool branch for a long while now and barely a peep from forrestv. Others have tweaked here and there on their own forks or personal copies, but nothing has come in by pull-request lately either.

So LTC and BTC devs that have pushed for this and contributed... Has there been any movement?  With the recent uproar about GHash.io and centralized pools, and a push for p2pool again, perhaps it's time for an accounting and see if we're getting anything for our time and donations and suggestions or are we throwing BTC and LTC into development that's just not happening?

anyone able to help me with how to make this work after editing the networks.py files?
says it cant import network


.Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run_p2pool.py", line 3, in
    from p2pool import main
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/main.py", line 25, in
    from . import networks, web, work
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/networks.py", line 1, in
    from p2pool.bitcoin import networks
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/bitcoin/networks.py", line 1, in
    from p2pool.bitcoin import networks
ImportError: cannot import name networks

In addition to roy7's reply, also remember that higher difficulty shares get a higher reward as a proportion of blocks found.

Stales have no effect on network hash power in terms of generating coins because stale shares that meet the block target are submitted to the coin daemon. If it is accepted, then the block pays out to the network even if it was a stale share for the share chain.


This wouldn't be healthy for the network. All shares should have the same chance of being stale. (Well, some nodes are more efficient than others, but it isn't because of the contents of the share.)

Miners using higher diff targets to help out smaller miners aren't hurt more by stales than anyone else. Yes when they have a stale share it is a larger loss than a smaller share would have been, but the smaller shares they are finding, the more stale shares they will have because it's all a %.

If you have a target of 1000 and a 1% stale rate, each stale share loses you 1000 diff 1 shares worth of work.

If you instead set target to /1 and have a 1% stale rate, then out of every 1000 diff 1 shares worth of work you lose 10 shares to stale and have 990 accepted.

In other words:

1000 per share * 100 shares = 100,000 shares of diff 1 work * 1% = 1000 diff 1 work (1 share) lost as stale.
1 per share * 100,000 shares = 100,000 shares of diff 1 work * 1% = 1000 diff 1 work (1000 shares) lost as stale

All in averages, of course. Total credit lost exactly the same. No matter what target you set, you'll lose stale % amount of it. The target will only change the variance of the stale cost.

Say there are 3 miners in all.

2 have a hash power of 1. 1 has hash power 2. Making a total of 4.

Without changing his difficulty the powerful miner would get 50% of the blocks. And the total hash rate of the network would be 4.

The Big miner then sets his difficulty to x2, effectively making him mine at the same speed as the other 2 smaller miners.

Now he gets 33% of the blocks, the same as the other 2 miners. BUT - if his block is not considered more 'worthy' of extension because of it's higher difficulty, the total network hash rate is now only 3.. We have just lost 25% of the power..

I have looked at the p2pool documentation but have not found reference to the actual way the longest chain is calculated,.. and whether the higher difficulty is used in the calculation.. if someone knows I'm all ears!

IF it is the case that your custom difficulty affects your shares 'weight', then a higher difficulty would mean your share is more likely to be the one that is extended in any chain race, and so less lightly to be a stale.. (Unless the total of all miners average each other out in some way) ?

I'm not sure whether a chain of proofs (for this purpose) is made stronger for any practical purpose if the more difficult solution is favoured. It makes little sense to favour more difficult solutions anyway, there would have to be some time limit or majority chain committal cutoff to define when a more difficult solution couldn't unseat a solution that was in the process of being accepted by the network. Then you'd have to reset the cutoff, to make it "fair", and another unseating could take place. This could create occasional chains of multiple usurped shares, according to the random distribution of miners on p2pool trumping a committed share.

That can't be right.. When working out which chain is the one with the most work, the longest, and so which one to extend, a large miner's share with higher difficulty must be more important than a normal share.. Otherwise there is wasted work being done and the chain is weaker?

BTCest thread I've seen in months.

Yes. Yes. I will be pledging more than just $/BTC to this cause. I am working towards working on this most important project, too!

P2P Mining Decentralization is the CORNERSTONE of the bitcoin protocol

No difference AFAIK

Stales happen because a share is based on the identifiable "current share". Everyone works on that. When someone submits a solution to the current share, it propagates across p2pool nodes, and it takes time to do that. This means that more than one person can have a solution to the current share competing to hit the majority of p2pool nodes. If your share looses the race, it's an orphan. There is no question of which share was the higher difficulty, just whose share gets majority acceptance first.

With regards to an incentive for large miners to increase their share difficulty, like (1 - Fee per share) in the document,

If a miner on p2pool sets a higher difficulty, his block effectively 'weighs' more than a normal share, and so is his share LESS lightly to be turned into a stale share ?


 

Is this initiative and the suggestions put forth still active?

The current hashrate of P2Pool for Bitcoin seems to have dropped or remained flat as the difficulty has sky-rocketed in the last few months.

Are we going to see another push here and on Reddit to get more hashrate onto P2Pool nodes?

For a node to handle some of the load for the network, it would have to manage shares and payouts.  This requires trust of some kind.

The p2pool system is to use a sharechain, but to move some of the load off the sharechain means you have to replace that trust.

why do supernodes have to be hidden for what i said to work? they can be public, just let p2pool handle the connection.
Obviously an hacked up miner could connect to a node of his choice, but what incentive would he have to do so in a balanced network?

What if the pool owner rips off the people who connect to him?

Putting everything onto a chain is what keeps everything honest.  Connecting to a public p2pool node has the same variance as connecting to your own personal one.

For public nodes to work, there has to be reputation of some kind, you can't just have hidden super-nodes.

is this still active?

Is #5 just the creation of one sub-pool? the description of the idea is very shallow...

IMHO p2pool should behave like gnutella (or any other decent DHT with supernodes), where each user says if he can be a supernode. If he can, he becomes a sub-pool of p2pool. He has no control over who joins him.
When a regular miner connects to p2pool, p2pool chooses a sub-pool to connect to, balancing the miners. With enough sub-pools, no/very small double spend probability.

This would also solve the ease of use problem discussed in the reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1usb72/p2pool_i_really_tried_but_its_not_working_for_me/

Maybe this has democratization implications? We want democracy, not anarchy though.
I'm sure this has been proposed ages ago since it is so simple, but another push won't hurt. I'd donate decently for it.

10% is better than the current p2pool average, in fact. I think people just need to fully absorb the way the concept works (including me  ).

For the whole mining world, not just those trying out p2pool, too many miners seem to have the impression that you simply "plug it in, then watch the money fly out". You really need to get a grasp of everything that affects your mining as best you can. For instance, there are still people that think buying with fiat and making more than that amount back at a future cryptocurrency exchange rate constitutes profitability. Even more hilariously, some buy coins to pay for the equipment immediately before they make their order. It seems that money printing machines are a little too tempting a business to become involved with, strange isn't it!

Dont worry about rejects on p2pool. 10% of rejects is normal.
Rejects are on centralized pools too, simple they hide it as they are centralised and they work on pps so that doesn't matter for them.

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