Topic: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? - page 3. (Read 2813 times)

I'd still like to get some feedback from some of the large-ish holders that I know exist in this forum

Come on, 100+ guys, talk to me...

The 51% situation doesn't bother you at all? And wouldn't it be nice if we could actually do something to fix it? Would be cool, if in a year from now p2pool is the single biggest provider of hash power, and it was us, the investors, who gave the nudge to get there...

I wouldn't say that calling the 0.5% an incentive misleading.  P2Pool is the only pool that I know of that rewards the person who finds the block with more than just their submitted shares.  This could be a decent incentive for someone with larger hashing power to join P2Pool as they would approximately .125 BTC in addition to their shares when their hardware finds a block.  While that may not sound like a lot to some people, I wouldn't mind an extra $73.55 for letting my hardware do what it's already doing.

Statistics

today

week

month


Donations
1 1 43 

Donated
0.02 btc 0.02 btc 2.5219 btc 

Largest
0.02 btc 0.02 btc 1.0 btc 

Payouts
238 238 7259

The one in my sig (not mine but setup recently by the blisterpool guy) seems to be most used and it has stats on total donated.

Okay, that was a bit misleading then. I thought you were talking about a 0.5% incentive provided to miners that are on p2pool vs. miners in other pools, and I was pretty surprised to hear that would have been there.

Any info on total donations to p2pool? Would you say your donation tool is the most used one?

Personally i prefer Ghash because they offer a userfriendly website. I can automatically split the income between several wallets for example.

And most mining pools offer apps to check your hasrate on your phone or on a google chrome plugin. So you don't have to check all the time if your miner is still running.

If those things would be created for P2P to make P2P as userfriendly as Ghash than personally i would love to join P2P. But ight now it's just too much of a hassle.

Sorry, 5-10c? You don't mean cent, right?

Also, care to explain the 0.5% bonus? How is that implemented, and who provides that incentive... I didn't know about that.

EDIT: just saw that this month, you got 2.5 BTC. That's not much. Any idea what the total donations to p2pool are per month, on average?

There is an easy donation tool from blisterpool in my sig that requires no bitcoind.

Donations that come through usually total around 5-10c and you may see three per week.

P2pool miners get a 0.5% bonus for finding a block.

I am sure more miners would join if some of the variation is softened by more donations.

Also miners are not required to run a node, just find one that's close to them.

Opinions are divided (to say the least) on how dangerous a single pool reaching 51% or more of hash power really is.

Some say it's not a big deal and it's all hysteria, others go as far as calling Bitcoin "ghash coin". I tend to think the answer is somewhere in the middle: it's a serious problem, in the sense that our "trustless network" becomes a bit less trustless when a single pool can get close to a hashrate majority, but I also don't buy that it's an imminent & practical danger - no rational pool operator would risk the entire base of this wealth to earn a few extra bucks.

First, a disclaimer: I'm not a miner myself, so some of the finer points of mining and mining pools probably elude me. That said, I am under the impression that a lot, if not: most of the 51% pool problem would disappear if a majority of "floating" hash power would join p2pool.

Agreed so far? Let's say p2pool is the solution. There seem to be reasons why miners don't use p2pool more often yet. The most common reason I've heard so far is that p2pool requires the participating miner to run a full node (while regular pools need only a light client). I never quite understood why that is exactly such a big obstacle (if you can spend thousands on ASICs, how hard can it be to get the hardware/connection to run a full node?), but I'm not here to argue with the miners. They are economical actors, so I'll assume they know what they're doing.

Alright, I'll come to my point:

1) It would be preferable for everyone who has a stake in Bitcoin if a majority of hashing power would join p2pool.

2) Miners, by and large, aren't doing that. Currently p2pool sits at around 1% of total hashing power.

My conclusion:

Those who have a large stake in Bitcoin should try to give more incentives to miners to join p2pool, as it will benefit themselves in the long run.


Do you agree? If so, what's the most effective way for us (as investors/traders) to provide such incentives? The wiki mentions p2pool donations already exist, but I couldn't even find the total of donations received so far. Also, it looks like Bitcoind is required to donate, which limits the number of potential donators.

How about a to do list?

• Set up donation address
• Advertise, and convince large Bitcoin stakeholders to donate to p2pool, arguing that it is in their own self interest
• Make sure there is little room for embezzlement of the donated funds, i.e. guarantee and check that donated funds are distributed among p2pool miners.

That's my pitch. Any input welcome.



Some links:

P2Pool Wiki article

P2Pool thread on bitcointalk

Hashrate distribution, by pools