Topic: p2pool - Advancement of Decentralized Mining - Vital to Bitcoin Network Security - page 3. (Read 19474 times)

P2Pool all time "luck" is now at 117.6%— It would be interesting if we had a way of telling how much of that is actual luck vs just p2pool having a block relaying advantage due to its highly distributed nature.

https://blockchain.info/address/1KxvX5Hx8nh36ig2gT5bpeEcqLQcwJsZGB
http://explorer.litecoin.net/address/LPfkfi2tMuGSc64PZTsP9Amt367hwAUQzY

Further donations raised in support of decentralized mining is now approaching $1,000.  Please give to further incentivize these important development goals.

Thanks for the donation warren and Litecoin devs!

I like the sub-pool idea.  I've already contributed a patch (mostly taken from generalfault's stratum-mining fork) to log shares to a MySQL database.  It would be great if this could be standardized and also offer clients the option of connecting using getblocktemplate as well as stratum or getwork.  I've also written a custom difficulty patch that I can share.  I like the idea of encouraging miners to use higher difficulty, but I'm not sure how well that would work with a sub-pool.  There would need to be a way to pass that cost on to miners, especially if allowing them to set their own difficulty.

The DB share logging patch I submitted could easily be extended using the same stratum-mining code (the two licenses are compatible) to support PGSQL and SQLite.

You might also want to take a look at how stratum-mining distributes new work to miners as it seems much more lightweight than the way P2Pool does it.

#2, this is a great idea in tandem with #3 or #4  (didn't read the full specifics on those)

#7, yeah, not so much anymore (since I put a 1% fee on it), but before I would have up to 10 work requests per cycle, so had to set maxblocksize to 1000...   even w/ a very good computer, at 100,000 size, it would take something around 100-150ms to get all the new work out

#8, i already do this for my own nodes  =p     ...   though i can't monitor the incoming connections constantly.. so some automated disconnect for peers that aren't helpful at all would be nice

ed: oh, on #7 + #8, since the majority of people never bother to alter the defaults, some easy method of choosing the type of node you want to run might be beneficial.  i've always felt 6 outgoing connections is far too few, and a lot of people have incoming firewalled.  

maybe when you initially run p2pool, it generates a config file & asks you how many outgoing connections you want, w/ suggestions based on bandwidth.  similar problem, most people never touch --p2pool-node

thanks warren

1. c. this is a must as not everyone is bothered with high variance, so there must be an option to not pay this fee.

2. a. good idea, this will lower the amount of new miners leaving p2pool.

5. we need this since quite some time.

6. is 6 needed if 5 is done properly?

7. this is probably one of the main goals as it will reduce lost (in terms of p2pool blocks, not btc blocks) work alot and would finally alow to create "super-nodes"

Great work Warren!

Keep Bitcoin and Litecoin decentralized!

Centralization at large mining pools is a long-term risk to the safety and security of the Bitcoin network.  p2pool-like mining is vitally important as it does not create systemic risk in the form of centralized pools.  p2pool also benefits the network by substantially boosting the quantity of listening relay nodes across the world.  On November 8th, 2013, the Litecoin Dev Team awarded a ~$2,000 grant (and $1,000 more on December 29th) to Forrest Voight in support of development to improve the scalability of the p2pool decentralized mining network.


Our previous support of forrestv enabled the release of ASIC-capable p2pool-13.x for p2pool BTC along with minor improvements to scalability and dust reduction that were of benefit to both the Bitcoin and Litecoin networks.  This new grant is to encourage further research & development that would allow p2pool to comfortably scale to a much larger size.

p2pool Research & Development Ideas Document
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fbc6yfMJMFAZzVG6zYOwZJvYU0AhM4cvd4bUShL-ScU/edit
Several different proposals are being brainstormed in this document.  Please add comments to the document or reply in this thread if you have ideas.

$2,000 is not enough for this important cause.  Join us in support of Decentralized Mining!
Decentralized mining is vitally important to the long-term security of the Bitcoin network.  $2,000 is too small for this important purpose, so I urge you to please join us in donating to support these important development goals.

forrestv's GPG signed statement: http://im.forre.st/pb/50065825.txt

To be clear, forrestv is not a Litecoin Dev.  We just consider his work to be vitally important so we encourage the entire community to support his efforts to protect the Bitcoin network.  If someone else has a feasible implementation even better than p2pool then we may be interested in supporting that too.

Why is Litecoin supporting this cause?
Litecoin Dev takes part in several substantive efforts in support of Bitcoin because we are in the same boat in terms of technology development and the needs to protect the network.  Litecoin gives back to Bitcoin and will increasingly do more in the coming year.

• Litecoin 0.8 contains some patches that differ from Bitcoin 0.8, backported fixes from Bitcoin 0.9, and other things not yet merged in Bitcoin 0.9.  Our testing on a smaller scale with real users and real money on the line has enabled finding bugs and further verifying patches before code shipped in Bitcoin 0.8.x and 0.9.
• Those improvements to 0.8 are also published in Bitcoin 0.8.5 OMG, a well-tested branch of Bitcoin 0.8.5 plus many bug fixes and mature features beyond the standard 0.8.5.  This branch has also helped to find bugs before they reach Bitcoin 0.9.  p2pool miners may like the disablewallet feature.
• Litecoin Dev also supports various Bitcoin devs including forrestv in support of work important to both features and network security.