P2Pool Project
Hello coiners!
Some of you may recognize Blockburner from our past project to develop a Scrypt FPGA. Ultimately the project fell through, but undeterred I kept moving onward.
After some time and trying a few things, ultimately the direction I want Blockburner to take is in deployment of distributed blockchain technologies and solving problems with open source.
We started mining a few months ago, however as a smaller player it is now overwhelmingly evident there is no sense investing in mining hardware as long as large hardware makers dominate the network. The network hash rate needs no more help rising astronomically.
What absolutely does need more development and decentralization are mining pools as well as Bitcoin Core nodes, which I think we can all agree are much too centralized by private, closed source players. This is an area I believe Blockburner could do well in attacking.
Blockburner
Founded in Montana as an LLC, June 13, 2013
Blockburner is designed as an open source company that deploys distributed applications based on blockchain technologies. The present focus is on the Bitcoin network.
Project
Deployment of a P2Pool network beginning in Montana, eventually across the US.
Deployment of corresponding Bitcoin Core node servers.
Network
Pool node hardware would be hosted by various datacenters (ours and/or third party). Initial deployment target is the Montana State University datacenter in Bozeman, MT.
Hardware would be built using open hardware standards (Open Compute) as much as possible, utilizing 100% open source software (likely Ubuntu 12.04, P2Pool, Bitcoin Core). The hardware would comprise of clusters using low-cost components utilizing Apache Mesos, Hadoop, or other distributed computing platforms. This is also meant to be an exercise in parallel computing infrastructure and its application to Bitcoin and other blockchains. With such a network in place Blockburner would have much flexibility in supporting many networks directly with high availability service nodes. This network would also be useful for scientific computing and other distributed projects.
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Really these are not difficult concepts in practice, as all of the hardware and software required already exists. I myself am an experienced datacenter tech and computer junkie with the necessary skills to carry this out.
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Community Q & A
As with the last project, I felt it foolhardy to initiate any kind of business in this space without asking the community its thoughts and concerns as a gauge of interest and need. This project will be no different-
I think much of the issue with P2Pool is the availability of nodes, as network latency does have a direct effect particularly if your hashrate is on the low side. Existing nodes seem to have sloppy uptimes, as such the incentive to use the P2Pool network is low compared to private central pool servers. So-
1. Do you think mining and pool centralization is a problem? Why or why not?
2. If a reliable (high availability) node was in your area, would you switch to P2Pool? How about other networks, such as Litecoin?
3. What other factors would increase your interest in distributed mining over private mining?
4. Would you be interested in investing in such a network as a shareholder? What kind of return or benefits would you expect or want from such an investment? (revenue share from the pools profits, for example)
5. Are there other node services you would find useful or think are needed overall?
Thank you in advance to anyone willing to give me some insight.
Vires in Numeris
Operatr