Bitcoin Forum

Hi

Im just wondering why is P2Pool not used more? I mean bitcoin is suppose to be decentralized than why do miners do not use P2Pool?

Any explanation?

Only been asked a Gazillion times in even more threads.  Not too hard to find.

Edit: And with your level of message activity in these forums, I'm sure you have seen the arguments more than enough.  So if you want to promote P2Pool just be honest and start a thread that promotes it instead of this bait and switch technique.

Why don't u answer instead of being a mega dick ?

Wow you are really nice! I have been on this forum for a long time yes. But I didt check about p2pool. So yeah I still wonder why.

Maybe next time link some btctalk thread instead of being a dick. Thanks

Because this horse has been beaten to death and I can't believe he doesn't know the reasons.  Which means he is just trying to drum up support for p2pool.  Which is fine, just say so.

Here are the two main reasons it isn't used more.

1.  Only the top hashers have a chance of submitting a share that will receive a payment.  Low end hashers, like myself, would rarely submit a share with a high enough difficulty to receive payment.

2.  Your payment comes in dribs and dabs so your have a "bag of pennies" which will cost you in high transaction fees when you try to spend those coins.

And if you are honestly asking for information, then I am sorry for my attitude in my initial response.  If you were a newbie my response would have been more reasonable, but your not so I thought you were yet another traditional pool bashing p2pool proponent.

Thanks you. Better answer.

Home mining is getting less and less interesting. Wondering how mining company will do to attract more home mienrs?

I mined a few Ths with p2pool before I wised up and pointed my stuff back to a pool that actually earned me BTC.

People don't use it because it is a broken piece of shit.

P2P is good if you have huge hashing power (in THS at least)...

p2p went poof once stratum come along and theris newer coming out soon. So no doubt stratum will end up soon becoming like p2p went. p2p had too many problems on it. To begin with it was fine for none asic equipment but soon as aics turnd up acisc chomped though shairs like water in a river soon come along stratum and fixed a lot of problems and cured stale or rejected shares  that p2p seems to have. I know my acis I have do not like p2p pools yet they are some good p2p pools still going that do work fine but not many because their crap.

Don't mix your thoughts about stratum's demise with complaints about p2pool. Stratum isn't going anywhere. While it wasn't a perfect protocol, it was billions of times better than getwork and is "good enough" and now everything uses it so there is zero initiative on either the mining software or pool software side to change it.

No kidding...

IMO OP, I really don't know. Maybe some don't like to have a wallet for a coin on their system until they are ready to use it? I always did prefer p2pools, just because I get a micro-thrill every time I see a payment pop up. They are not hard to set up either, so it is beside me.

First, let me state that I'm a proponent of p2pool.  I run my own nodes.  I have contributed code to folks.  I have spent a ton of my time in these forums on the p2pool threads trying to help others.  I have mined on p2pool for just shy of a year.  Having written that, let me explain why p2pool doesn't have more of a following than it does.

1) P2Pool has a pretty large flaw in its implementation, which has been alluded to here on this thread.  The larger the pool gets, the more variance the miner experiences.  This is exactly the opposite effect of a traditional pool like Con's pool.  The larger that pool gets, the less variance.  Why does p2pool have this problem?  Because of the share chain that p2pool relies upon to pay miners.  In effect, the share chain is nothing more than an alt coin that you are solo mining.  The more hash rate thrown at it, the higher the difficulty becomes (just like Bitcoin).
2) It's pretty freaking inconvenient to operate.  Rather than a nicely packaged up application, it requires you to install a number of dependencies to run.  Unless you're familiar with Python and its packages, don't bother with running a p2pool node.  Granted, there are a ton of public nodes out there for you to connect to, but ultimately you'd want to run your own node to truly decentralize things.
3) Lack of developer involvement.  The guy who wrote the code initially is prone to disappearing acts.  It's been quite some time since he's actively posted in the p2pool thread.  The latest commit he made actually broke the pool, and anyone who had updated needed to revert to a previous state.
4) Variance.  While I mentioned one side of the problem in my first point, here's the other side.  Because it doesn't have a very large following, p2pool block finding times fluctuate pretty wildly.  Combine that with your own miners' luck in finding shares and you can get some pretty wild payout swings.  If you want to see a real-world example, check out the test I've been running here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=891298.0

Hope this helps.

@jonnybravo0311,
Thanks for the info.  Your input made this thread worthwhile.
It's sad to hear the report though.  I, as many, kept hoping that p2pool would be a much more viable option for miners.  What do you think the probability of something coming out of the p2pool development that would actually be viable option?  I would hate to see the idea just die.

There have been a number of people trying to do something about it.  If you look at the thread I linked to the test I'm running, you can see how OgNasty approached it.  Quick summary: he put a traditional pool on top of p2pool's backbone.  It's an innovative approach, but the solution reduces variance by centralization.  You're forced to stay on his node if you want the variance reduction offered.

Bitmain came out guns blazing a number of months back with their antpool claiming they were going to revolutionize p2pool.  Yeah, that went nowhere.

A few of us suggested using side chains or some other method of managing variance.  That hasn't been implemented yet, either.

So, all in all, things are kind of at a standstill.  Nobody's produced a solution that has been incorporated to p2pool base code.  Bitmain forked the code, but hasn't done a thing with it in months.  OgNasty (well, actually it's Nonnakip who's written it) front end is completely proprietary and written in C.

Wish I had better news for you, but p2pool pretty much exists as it has.  If you don't mind the variance, or have enough hashing power to counteract it a bit, then go for it.  I'd say minimum entry at this point is 1TH/s.  I've got S3s and 440GH/s will miss the occasional block or 2.

EDIT: one other thing I forgot to mention... p2pool is written in Python and is single-threaded.  Can't scale very well on a single thread.

because the search function isn't broke.