Hi All,
I started to work on a Primecoin pool software. I intend this thread to be used as a central place for primecoin pools development.
I think many people are looking for alternative for ypool. What ypool did was great. They offer possibility to people with small and less powered cpu to mine xpm, also reducing variance in finding share.
But I think we need other pools for primecoin to get enlarged adoption, to reduce the probability of a 51% attack or fork, and we need a pool software to be "free" from a mining software. People should be free to use their miners on all pools as long as their miner fully implement the protocol.
I'm almost new into bitcoin/altcoin space so I'll spend all this week to look around bitcoin/primecoin RPCJSON protocol. I also still hesitate about two choices for my pool software.
- First use an existing bitcoin pool software and write necessarily changes to make primecoin work on it. I'm reluctant to this, because It could result in a huge job (getting internal of primecoin, getting internal of selected mining software, and then rewrite it for primecoin).
-Second, write my pool software from scratch (only based on primecoin)
As far as now, I think i understand how bitcoin pools work, at least in getwork and GBT protocols. Primecoind support GBT, so writing a pool software should be "easily" feasible but we still need an accurate measure of provided work by miner. I heard that ypool is using chain of lenght >= 6 as valid shares, resulting in fewer chains to considered as "stale". Is that accurate ?
PS: For what it worth, that I write my own pool or reuse an existing one, the final pool engine will be opensourced.
The primecoin client had mining 'software' included in it since none of the current mining programs could be used or easily adapted to it. ypool created it's own miner at the same time they created their pool and did so successfully. You will have to do the same thing, creating your own metric for work shares or you will have to take apart one of the current miners to see what information it sends and then create your pool based on that information.
I could be wrong, but my personal feeling is that taking an existing pools software would be more hassle than it's worth, the architectures are totally different.