Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin network follows bitcoin protocol and any message sent to bitcoin node has to follow strict rules that enforced by cryptography. If a bitcoin node has a hashing power attached to it, then it's not only verifies and relays new blocks and transactions but also creates new blocks and forces protocol rules into blockchain. So it's those bitcoin nodes that have hashing power and knowledge about protocol govern Bitcoin network and make it secure.

The basic security premises of bitcoin concept was that there would be decentralized network of bitcoin nodes each with small share of hashing power to ensure that there is no single person or small group who can control Bitcoin network. If it's not true then quite a lot of bad things could happen, here is the link with some examples of what kind of new rules can be enforced if someone have majority of hashing power under control, this is also known as soft-fork (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283746.msg3039531#msg3039531), to name a few: shorter block time interval, coin divisibility, native color coin support or require AML registration for every address and turn it into surveillance coin (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283746.msg3126778#msg3126778).

Bitcoin value comes from it's utility, it is much easier to store and transfer ownership of value by using Bitcoin network. There is a one way relationship between Bitcoin network value and amount of hashing power, the more value Bitcoin network has the more amount of hashing power would be bought by miners. But the opposite is not true, if tomorrow Bitcoin hashing power drop by two nothing bad would happen, after maximum of 2014 blocks network hashing difficulty would readjust, it would be twice easier to find a block and everything would go back to normal, bitcoin market price would not drop either.

People who create bitcoin infrastructure, provide services and innovate are those who make Bitcoin network useful and increase it's value, but via inflation hashers leech that value out of Bitcoin, in exchange they were suppose to help to enforce Bitcoin network rules in decentralized manner. That premises was broken by pools, no longer hashers have to run bitcoin software and govern Bitcoin network instead they just point their hashing power to pools and delegate their enforcement power to small group of people, and that makes that hashing power useless in terms of securing Bitcoin network.

Concerns about pools and how they erode bitcoin security were first raised more than two years ago when Deepbit acquired significant share of bitcoin hash power, but most people agreed that in case a pool would be used for nefarious actions hashers would just point to another more honest pool. The reality didn't match those expectations, Ghash.io was used for double spending (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1qqmr4/ghashiocexio_and_doublespending_against_betcoin/). And yet two months after the incident their hashing power share was 15% bigger, and it's only dropped after they stopped accepting new hashers. This is happening because hashers do not care about Bitcoin network security and from that point of view they are evil.

Hashers are not miners, they just hash previous block looking for magic number, they don't care where this block came from or how it was created. Bitcoin network doesn't need hashers, they are parasites who are leeching value from Bitcoin without providing anything in return.

That is a lot of explanation about the problem. What is the solution?

How do you convince "hashers", who just sell hashing power to a pool, to become "miners", who submit blocks which they've created themselves?

I'd like to see the community consider the issue (or set of issues) to be an architectural flaw and over time migrate to an implementation which corrects the flaws.

I doubt seriously that it would happen however.  Many do not consider these things to be flaws (clustered around the Bitcoin Foundation as I see it) and the mining contingent already has more than enough clout to nuke any foundational shifts they don't agree with.

Not only that but Bitcoin is mature enough now such that it would be extremely difficult to make such changes even if everyone was on-board.

I have to disagree. Those holding bitcoins (which doesn't necessarily coincide with those mining them) have the clout. Miners forcing changes holders do not want, or not embracing changes holders do want, will find themselves mining worthless coins.

An Issue really is that there only is a financial incentive to submit hashes and not to provide the additional infrastructure Bitcoin needs, Bandwidth and space to store the Blockchain -Y run a full node.

In the very beginning only solo mining was possible and every Hasher was a real miner who crated blocks and verified transactions. This changed with the development of pooled mining.

I wonder if the possibility of pooled mining is just something Satoshi didn't think about.

Also, for a Noob you have a pretty good understanding  :)

By telling them to use p2pool. You have the advantages of a pool but no "pool owner" that can mess with the network.

Well... yes and no.

Short term: There is no financial incentive to be a "miner". Just submit hashes to a pool and get paid.

Long term: If the network is successfully attacked thanks to consolidation of hashing power into the hands of a malicious individual or group, and confidence in the currency is lost, no one will be getting paid for hashing or mining.

Unfortunately, it seems most "hashers" are short sighted.

Of course, if the consolidation never result in an attack, it doesn't much matter.

I've been a proponent of P2Pool from the start. I've advertised it. I've donated to forrestv. I've donated to the P2Pool miners. I've mined there myself. I've asked for the community to donate. I've asked for the miners to switch. I've written a beginner's guide (probably outdated by now). Yet, it's still a small part of the network total. Besides it does have some issues of it's own. When your hash rate is small enough that you don't find a share during the share chain window, you experience extreme variance beyond that of simply being in a small pool (hashers obviously hate extreme variance which is why we have huge pools to begin with).

What I'm saying is, "telling them to use P2Pool" isn't a solution because people don't listen.

And I'll have to disagree with this.

In my case, I consider Bitcoin's value in solving my potential problems to be directly proportional to it's potential to thwart state level attack.  This means decentralization.

As centralization occurs or seems inevitable, my interest in the solution from both a financial and political point of view diminishes.  Consequently my liquidation strategy changes.  Of course it might be argued that it is a good thing when 'hoarders' let go their BTC, but the effects will be short term and it could probably be considered something of an omen and/or harbinger.

It is critical to note that my thoughts on this are completely forward thinking.  I'll agree that nothing bad things have not happened yet, and concede that it could be some time before they do (if ever.)  That is irrelevant to me.  I speculated on Bitcoin some time ago with an eye toward the future and the future continues to be where my full attention is directed.

Yes, I see your point. I agree. Miners are trying to get the best reward for their work, pools can help achieve this. But it was bitcoin that offered this reward and encourage miners to chase it.

I completely agree with you OP. Hashers, as you call them, are just another example of profit mongers that are using Bitcoin to reap whatever short term reward there is out of Bitcoin and convert it to fiat. That's Bitcoins biggest problem as far as I can tell. This community is plagued by them and even has devs that seem to fit in that category. I've always seen pool sysops as profit mongers with the exception of a couple of them. Pool operators don't help the network as much as they help themselves to network power and control. If P2Pool was implemented before the pools took control it could have captured and kept majority control of the network because individuals would have been required to learn its use to reap the reward. Sadly, it's now too late for any meaningful change.

Well... that comment was my way of making fun of those who would make light of the situation, so I agree with your disagreement. ;p

A centralized Bitcoin is worthless to me. Do you hear that hashers?

Bitcoin is open for anyone to join. There's money to be made from Bitcoin. People flock in to turn a buck just like dogs follow the scent of urine. That's just the natural order of things. People design software with good intentions but good intentions don't count for nothing in the end and some things just can't be foreseen.

There is a clear distinction between Miners and Hashers. Miners verify validity of transactions and blocks according to Bitcoin protocol but Hashers do no such thing they are happy to hash anything while looking for magic number. I would like people to understand it because that will help to get the message out.

p2pool is the best solution we have right now. Working to promote it and improve it (for example with prettier graphs that miners like) is the best thing that can be done short term.

It is important to recognize that not everyone needs to adopt p2pool to help the problem a lot, or even solve it entirely. If p2pool hypothetically made up 50% of the network hash rate, then no other pool (or even a group of them secretly colluding) could possibly ever get over 50%. In fact every incremental gain made my p2pool makes the centralized (i.e. dangerous) pools smaller. p2pool at 10% would be a huge step (currently at 2%).

tldr: support p2pool.

One last thing.  It is entirely reasonable for small hobby miners to just solo mine. Yes it is high risk but people spend good money on lottery tickets, so no reason to not take shot on getting a full block (roughly 20K USD equivalent) if you are doing it for fun and not a business with bills to pay. People need to understand (and the OP deserves credit for trying to explain it) that this is not like folding@home or some other grid where accumulating numbers on a score ranking is the goal for a participant. If you want to help the network it is far better to solo mine.

Thank you for your support, I think if we can explain the problem and why it is important, then it would be possible to convert Hashers to Miners.

That's a very astute summary of an ongoing issue for a newbie. You've either been watching and reading quietly for years or you're a sock of someone that knows what's going on. I don't mind though. I've done that too. Sometimes you want to cheer and say how great things are going and at other times you want to tell the old timers here exactly how far they've wedged their head up their ass. Multiple accounts work well for that.  ;)

Simply put,
you cannot expect people to solo mine because at the current difficulty, most of the ppl will never close any block and hence won't ever cash in any coins.
Keeping the difficulty constant and half of the reward  instead could maybe be more suited for an ecosystem with a lower hasher/miner ratio. I think this is the obvious solution (if only it would be one).
But of course, all in all, the problem that bitcoin solves is:

How do you enforce a set of rules on a p2p network and make sure noone changes it at will?

So I'm not sure what most people are thinking of when they talk about changes in the protocol.

That said, and ignore the copycats, bitcoin is the first real experiment of its kind. Maybe in the future, a more advanced/robust crypto currency could displace bitcoin, maybe one that builds on top of bitcoin's distribution of wealth.
 
EDIT: i haven't look into p2p as it is quite new. My first impression is that most are just blindingly assuming it will solve all problems. Could anyone explain in a couple of paragraphs how it works?

You're trying to demoralize a perfectly legitimate behavior on part of the "hashers", but this only diverts the discussion from the real issue: the protocol itself.
The protocol was designed to encourage profit seekers, or "hashers", to.. hash.

Satoshi didn't foresee this centralization behavior.
But I can guarantee you, that if he did, he wouldn't seek a moralizing argument, but a technical solution.
The whole point of Bitcoin is to be moral-agnostic, and trust-free. It's a cryptographically secured public ledger, not a charity fund or a society equalizer.

Calling names is pointless. We need technical solutions, not moral preaching.

Sell it as a lottery or raffle. The current block size of about 20K USD is definitely attractive to a certain audience. In fact there is an audience for these prizes at pretty much any size, so this does scale. Sure most people get no coins, but imagine the fun of checking your miner and finding out that you mined/won the big jackpot.

Of course there is also an audience for wanting to see $0.17 worth of BTC "mined" each day slow and steady via a pool. But the larger the population of lottery players, the less significant the pools become. The world has shown conclusively that lotteries can organize billions of dollars worth of resources across millions of people, which is just what Bitcoin mining is supposed to do.

Right now there are plenty of pools and plenty of competition. This only becomes an issue if we get to the point of only having 3 pools making up 99% of the total hashrate.

Maybe there should be a rule, no single pool can ever have more than 33% of the total hashrate? But its impossible to enforce. Bitcoin Foundation could help here possibly, but its unlikely.  

Yes, obviously p2pool is the answer but how do we get people to flock to it? People are now gladly giving up 5% of their profits to have zero variance. The human brain is highly illogical at times.

Miners are self interested so the solution can only be one that serves their self interest. Anything else is 100% guaranteed to fail.

But dont blame the miners for being "evil" or greedy for using pooled mining, self interest is natural and healthy. Bitcoin would not exist without this self interest.

Are you greedy for keeping 100% of your paycheck and not giving all profits above rent+food to charity? No, just a normal person. Donating a bit every year helps your conscience though.

Wow, great post. Please, post more often.

This is a very thoughtful reply, I completely agree.

Believe it or not OP, miners, hashers, are in this to generate bitcoin. Do you believe anyone would buy a jupiter or example if they were told they might not generate a block, ever? People join one pool over another not because they are evil parasites, but because they're new and they don't yet understand everything there is to know about the protocol.

What I am trying to do is different, good definitions have a much greater chance to lead to intelligent discussion and this is why it is important to recognize difference between Miners and Hashers. Opening up a good discussion is a first step in finding solution.



Helping new people to understand the difference between Miners and Hashers is important. Miners are different from Hashers because they honor the social contract with Bitcoin community, in exchange for the reward they provide security to Bitcoin network. I think that development of tools that would make it easier for Hashers to become Miners would be a good thing.

Yes, I should have used 'hasher' in place of 'miner'. Hasher doesn't really add anything to bitcoin, but a Miner does add value to bitcoin.

We've gone around and around on this topic for years.  Some of the real old-timers and significant contributes who have had an actual relationship with 'Satoshi' have produced information which makes it pretty clear to me that the guy not only anticipated pretty significant centralization but welcomed it.  The whole "Moore's law" thing is just marketing material for technically deficient clowns/victims.

This puts me personally in a bind because I take the opposite view of how A-OK centralization is.  As a defensive mechanism I take the approach of simply disagreeing with Satoshi and not really considering him/them some sort of a mythical deity-like being.  Whoever he/they are/were they obviously had some good ideas and the implementation of Bitcoin is very impressive as an experimental first-cut.  Bitcoin has been one of the more disruptive technologies in probably forever and it's just getting started, but it will probably be mostly remembered as being sort of a spark that ignited a lot more I'll bet.

This could be a reality if the big players in fiat transactions get involved. (Think paypal issuing an eBay coin or Visa issuing a real Visa coin). Expect massive advertising budgets, FUD, misinformation and the smear campaign against bitcoin and its users.

The majority of the public are not yet 'on board', there will be a war, the big players are just biding their time to strike.

Makes a lot more sense to simply appropriate Bitcoin and it's existing credibility.  90%+ of the current users, and a higher percentage every day, consider Bitcoin credible because someone else does without much concept about why.

Anyway, if/when blacklists come to town, controlling the blacklist entity is effectively controlling Bitcoin.  For people who know how money works that is fairly obvious.  I'm sure that is why we see the Mellon family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellon_family (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellon_family)) taking an active interest in getting out in front of this one.

I can't speak for everyone here, but I don't see where morals are involved at all. The entire issue revolves around profit. Short term profit versus long term sustainable profit.

I have no problem with hashers voluntarily selling their hashing power to centralized pools, but if that behavior results in those pools having the ability to attack Bitcoin, thus possibly destroying confidence in Bitcoin itself, those hashers are no longer going to be able to profit from selling hashing power.

Many people who hold large amounts of Bitcoin do so because of Bitcoin's decentralized nature. It would be wise to keep that in mind if your business is selling hash rate.

Satoshi did forsee a hashing power "arms race".

It is simply because p2pool involve another step of setting up a full node, which is not included in all the delivered ASIC miners. Being a full node need to download the whole blockchain and be online all the time, many people do not have that extra machine

If a miner receive his ASIC miners with a full node and p2pool configuration built in, then there will be more people running p2pool

You seem to be predicting the eventual downfall of Bitcoin. Any guess about which alt will be the successor and how long it will take?

Coin-which-does-not-exist-yet. :)

Being online all the time is not the issue, as miners already have to do that. But p2pool installation, configuration, etc. is definitely an issue. If you want to help with decentralization, work on making that easier (along with the other issues I mentioned -- pretty charts, etc.)

'downfall' is a misnomer.  I imagine that Bitcoin will be highly 'successful' in terms of utilization rates, valuations, and user satisfaction even if it does end up being operated by a handful of multi-nationals and some blacklist authority is fully operational.  Most people don't care about that shit.  But yes, I anticipate that it is more likely than not that this is the eventual path that Bitcoin will follow.

Hopefully what will happen is that simultaneously a variety of 'free' (to some degree or another) distributed crypto-currencies will develop and be used by entities for the benefit of people who willingly choose to support said entities.

I do not think it would be technically challenging to have exchange services find the natural valuations of any number of crypto-currencies.  Nor do I think it should be very expensive for the end-user to use these exchanges.  It's simply not a tough problem because the 'correct' state is one which is arrived at by nature.  There is no 'wrong answer' to valuations provided that the exchanges can function free of interference.  A natural consequence would be that the alternate crypto-currencies which are well managed and representative of a popular entity will hold higher values.  The big sticking point here is that it must be recognized as a natural and global human right to freely participate in such interactions and it is far from a sure thing that our political leaderships will be very keen on this concept.

There will likely evolve a viable 'reserve' or 'balancing' crypto-currency.  This is basically the function that XRP wishes to play in that Ripple monetary system I think.  I had hopes that Bitcoin would fill that role, and it may not be to late because the transaction rate (block size) has not been increased yet and because there is still the potential to foul up blacklisting I think.  But I'm expecting it more likely than not at this point that Bitcoin will blow it's chances here.  As I've said before, the old fable about 'The Fisherman's Wife'* fits real well.

 * The Western one...not the pornographic Japanese one involving penetration by slimy multi-armed creatures...though come to think of it that could have some applicability to the situation with Bitcoin and the Bitcoin Foundation and such as well...Hmmm...

I hate to admit it (to myself) I agree with most of you're argument. I disdain blacklisting and consider the concept the end of fungibility. Blacklisting will mean the end of Bitcoin for me. Bitcoin can, however, still be the next cool financial instrument to be used by the great unwashed masses. They are already quite comfortable with being controlled and obviously don't mind the constant surveillance of their finances because they allow the government to do it. TBF member businesses are posing as the company behind Bitcoin, negotiating with governments as the owner of Bitcoin and buying the devs. Get into bed with governments and the useful and unique qualities of Bitcoin will be destroyed.

The ideal behind the Bitcoin that I learned to appreciate can live on in another coin controlled by another collection of like minded people. Unfortunately, a multitude a problems must be overcome for that new coin to be the tool of financial freedom that I wanted Bitcoin to be. One problem is almost impossible to overcome and I see no solution available. Humans are corruptible and devs are humans. They can be employed by businesses that spring up around the new coin and develop the new coin into something the people don't want it to be. So we all abandon that coin and move to another one in an endless loop. I don't see an IOU or reserve system as a necessary component for a cryptocurrency and they already include a decentralized cryptographically secure accounting system. Open source is proving to work no better than closed source corporately controlled software works when the stakes are high.

Ya, I know what you mean.  I find myself agreeing with the likes of you, Justusravinair, etc more than I wish as well.  What can a guy do?

LOL Sorry, that came off wrong. I agree with much of what you say. I meant I can't believe that Bitcoin has become so fucked so fast and had so much promise in the beginning.

Lemme cheer you up then.

I am amazed that we've seen the success we have without excessive pressure to expand beyond the point of no return.  This is, I believe, because things are becoming 'off-chain' more or less organically.  Of course I would love to see everything be on-chain from a 'purity' perspective except that it would put unhealthy pressure on the infrastructure, and might have undesired privacy issues.  Going 'off-chain' or 'multi-tiered' actually takes away relatively little of Bitcoin's strength because Bitcoin still serves as the foundation.

Further some of the best devs are on 'our side' and there is fighting chance that methods will be implemented which can make blacklist tracking impractical.  At least I believe that the case though I admit to not really studying things that hard lately.

Upshot:  All hope is not lost for Bitcoin proper, and even if it goes bye-bye (as something that certain of us can respect) it has opened the door for follow-ons to improve upon.  These are going to be very interesting times for we who are interested in political/monetary issues.

I hope you're right and changes can be implemented successfully but I do worry that the users will not support it all. It's not that the systems can't be developed but the great unwashed will not support it for lack of understanding. I've been watching the development of CoinJoin and have always known that Gmaxwell is fighting the good fight but (because Bitcoin is a political instrument now) I don't believe he will ever get it included in the QT wallet. It will be interesting to watch it all unfold. In the end I suppose it really doesn't matter if Bitcoin can't be saved because entrepreneurs and exchange deceit have created a windfall for me that can simply be exchanged to a competing coin.   

Bump..

http://scaredfertile.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/crazy-pills.png


Why is 'centralization of mining' not the no.1 topic that the community is trying to address everyday?


http://bitcoinexaminer.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ghash.io-closer-to-51.png

Any suggestions on how we convince people to become smart miners instead of stupid hashers?

Many of us have been banging our head against this wall for years. After a while one grows tired of banging their head against a wall.

I don't think "force" is the correct way to get people to look out for their own best interests. Unfortunately, people are good at ignoring their own best interests.

Hi Holliday, my suggestion in the development section was the following


I think any major Bitcoin business wouldn't mind contributing to a transparent decentralisation fund that made P2Pool more attractive for hashers, even just as a Bitcoin user I woudn't mind paying 0.22% per trade on BTC-E for example vs. 0.20% if the additional funds went towards a P2Pool fund.

Do you know if the Dev's have tried approaching the big Bitcoin businesses and asking them for their solution? Because this is the biggest threat to their business and as far as I know they make a lot more money than the mining pools so they should have the upper hand.

I know of a few devs that have spoken about P2Pool. I don't know anything about them approaching big Bitcoin businesses.

There have been quite visible attempts to make P2Pool more attractive for miners (earlier in the life of P2Pool), but these attempts eventually lost steam. Recently there have been some attempts to reignite this fire, but I don't see any actual funds or bounties being started, only talk.

I guess I can try email some of the big players and see if I get a response.

It would be interesting to work out how much money would have to be added to P2Pool on a regular basis to make hashers switch.

If it's small enough, it might be do-able for one of the big businesses/exchanges to set it up and manage the incentive programme themselves.

Wondering about the title of the thread.   Clearly the OP has an opinion that is clearly stated.
Guess my question is: Assuming that hashers are not miner and the bitcoin network doesn't need them.  Is there anything that can be done about it?

Frivolous lawsuits aren't needed by the legal system; lobbyists aren't needed in politics.

so you guys think that switching to p2pool will do the job? p2pool script is for small p2pool nodes...when you will connect big cannon you will get to many rejects

First of all it is important to have people understanding the difference between Miners and Hashers, very few know what the difference is and why it is important to decentralize verification process. So at the moment the real question is how to make people understand that those who participate in pool mining are not miners.

Please elaborate on what you believe to be a sound resolution. Specifically, one that maximizes earning potential for individuals as well as bitcoin network security.

Donating coins to p2pool is certainly possible and there is a donation address for it, but it shouldn't really be necessary because p2pool already does better than centralized pools by reducing orphans, paying out transaction fees to miners, allowing merged mining and not charging any fees. So hashers who adopt it and become full miners should already increase their earnings.

The bigger issues are: 1) awareness, 2) easy of setup/management, 3) compatibility with some mining setups (some specific ASICs don't work well and very small miners won't get consistent earnings).  If you want to help with decentralization, contribute to working on one of these three items. Anyone who is interested, even without any programming or scripting ability, can help with 1).

What are your thoughts on p2pool and KNC Neptune

KNC Neptune doesn't even exist yet right? I don't think we know whether it will work yet with p2pool, but if you are buying one or considering buying one you can certainly ask KNC to make sure p2pool is well supported.

sure thing. I'll let you know if I get a response, but if you know anything about them....

The main purpose of this thread is to create a healthy discussion of the problem by using better definitions. So I don't have an opinion about what would be a sound solution, but what I do know is that current agenda of Bitcoin Foundation and involved core devs will give us centralized mining.

The next statement requires leap on intuition, I predict that centralized mining will have regulatory safeguards built around it and Bitcoin will become Banking 2.0 system, and I would like to hear why or why not it could be true.

When you say 'agenda', do you mean that, you believe that the Bitcoin Foundation and involved core devs are deliberately not trying to give us decentralised mining? If so, do you have any simple proof of that, that I would understand?

I have read several of these threads now, sparked I presume by the recent scare with Ghash.io acquiring nearly 50% of the network hashrate. This is a good thing: please keep making these threads to get the message across.

This is actually quite hypocritical of me to say, because I haven't been doing my part towards this issue - Its just more convenient to pick one of the well known pools and then you end up sticking with it, plus you have the interface to check your hashrate and auto payout options etc. From now on I will only point hashing power towards P2Pool, which I have know about and advocated for a while but not actually been using I'm ashamed to admit...

As far as I can tell there is no significant resources allocated from Bitcoin Foundation group to make mining more decentralized and they say that mining pools are ok as long as they don't misbehave, is that what you mean by "deliberately not trying to give us decentralised mining" ?

be careful that you are really using p2pool (p2pool.info). The web site p2pool.org has nothing to do with the actual p2pool and is in fact a centralized pool.

Thank you for switching Tirapon!


Hmm yes that is suspicous. Ekkio, do you think the Bitcoin Foundation should

A) Make the issue of 'centralisation of mining' a higher priority
B) Make it the no.1 priority
C) Literally stop everything else and just focus on that alone, till there is some solution in place?  

I certainly would like to see people spending more time looking for a political or technical solution to the problem but it can't be number one priority for Bitcoin Foundation because it's an academics and it's almost impossible to speed up the process no matter the amount of additional resources.

I have a KnC Jupiter and I usually have it using two pools, first my own p2pool merged mining node that merges all eight merged mined coins, second, in case of problems (like the motherboard currently being blown) with my p2pool it uses mmpool at bitparking as backup.

When using mmpool it correctly shows in its dashobard web system its hashrate.

When mining on my p2pool though it shows a hashrate about half what the p2pool is actually getting from it according to p2pool itself.

So this problem seems to be cosmetic, somehow the Jupiter's web system is extracting wrong information from the cgminer instance it is using.

But it took me some time to finally migrate to having my p2pool as first choice pool because at first it did seem like it had real problems trying to use p2pool.

One thing miners stand to gain by using p2pool instead of centralised pools is control over which coins to merge.

Until recently no public pool I knew of merged I0C, GRP, CLC nor XGG.

A while ago mmpool reinstated I0Coin and at the same time also added GRP.

But as far as I know you still miss out on both CLC and XGG if you use any centralised pool instead of running your own p2pool node.

As more blockchains implement merged mining, people using centralised pools will likely miss out on more and more merged mined blockchains.

-MarkM-

thanks for sharing your experience, really appreciated.

How did you discover that your real hashrate was actually twice the hashrate reported by cgminer? 

I have a more general question though: how is possible to improve the situation in a technical way? I've heard of other problems related to p2pool (latencies, flushwork). Are those problems real? Is there enough man-power, commitment and resources  behind the project?

why do people grumble about hashers??

Bitcoin must prove that it is able to deal with this and many other "problems" to come if it aspires for a sustainable currency.

Ok, they dont care about BTC or other altcoins and what?
I buy oil futures for speculation and I dont care about oil, am I evil??

The hashers just contribute to a crypto economy by creating a demmand for hardware, sending coins to exchanges etc. They are a vital part of the whole picture.

Correct. Cryptocurrency will have to deal with far more powerful forces than current  hashers.

If JP Morgan, WellsFargo, Microsoft, Apple, Google or Amazon want to start hashing then we'll see something altogether different.

Oh god I would love for that to happen.  That would be so great for bitcoin.  It would force the community to mobilize and get normal users mining.  It would be a temporarily "bad" thing but the result would be in the end amazingly good for bitcoin.  And meanwhile the price would be driven up due to the influx of all this new hashing power and the economic relationship between mining, perceived value, and actual real incentive and value.  It would push bitcoin truly mainstream almost overnight.

Also, completely agree with you OP.  Everybody should be either solo mining, p2pool mining, or always mining on pools with less than say 15% of the total network.  (Solo and p2pool obviously better-- getting work from central nodes is not what bitcoin is about!)  And everybody should also be merged mining namecoin.

that why i have plan in my PC to alternate 1 hour for pool and 1 hour for solo mining ... to support transactions even if pool fail.

Not a bad idea but a better plan is to alternate between a large pool (for consistent regular payouts) and (your own node on) p2pool (to support decentralization).  P2pool will not pay out as consistently as the big pool but much more regularly than solo mining, with the same benefits of decentralization.

though very optimistic, this could be the real life scenario :)



everybody should..... ? Come on, the system must be robust enough to deal with all the variety of people joining in. And even though the community of BTC miners prooved to be self-regulatory (Ghash issue) still I'm afraid  that somewhere in the shade "evil" forces are getting ready for an assult to test the overall integrity of the whole crypto-revolution :)

Just to clarify..

p2pool ROCKS. No question.

BUT - p2pool is not the BE ALL AND END ALL ANSWER.. I wish it was.

All p2pool does, from a technical perspective, is make bitcoin run on a much faster chain. Originally it was 10 seconds, but now has moved to 30 seconds, funnily enough to let the ASIC machines work on it... So it's chain is just, with 30 secs, 20 times easier to mine on. And yes, it is decentralised, just like btc. But that's all.

Once A LOT of hashing power moves to p2pool, EXACTLY the same thing will happen and only pools will be able to mine it.

You will not be able to mine solo on p2pool. You'll have to join a pool that mines p2pool.

And then the whole circus will start again.

A technical solution has yet to be found for this issue.

That doesn't mean it won't, but just saying 'EVERYONE JUMP ONTO P2POOL', is a temporary solution at best..

Now.. Let's think of a proper technical solution, as the OP suggests..

{..sits on chair and starts thinking..HARD..}..  :P
 

BTCGuild pays for orphans, pays transaction fees, merge mines NMC, and charges 1.5% fees.


And:
a) Increased disk space and IO requirements for the full Bitcoin blockchain
b) Increased CPU and memory requirements for running bitcoind
c) Increased network bandwidth requirements for running a full node
d) Increased variability
e) Increased transaction costs in later spending your mining income, due to the large number of small payments, rather than a single payment from a pool

For me, 1.5% seems like a fair charge to avoid those issues.

(To the thread in general) Stop assuming that people are being stupid or ignorant, just because they don't make the same choices you do.

I see nothing new here, why did we need a new thread to rehash old ideas?

Oops, I meant 3%

I guess I am just another "hasher" contributing the problem then. But I have just as much right to be here doing it as anyone else and if someone doesnt like it then they are more than welcome to leave.

for anyone who takes offense to someone jumping into this to make a quick buck, I'm sure you're not holding on to any coins at all?

holier than thou bullshit!!

The point is, if you want to continue to use your hardware investment to make a quick buck in the future, you might want to consider the health of the network which is paying the bills.

Perhaps even, if the network was in a healthier state, there may be more investor confidence, and you could be earning even more today.

But, by all means, do as little as you can to earn a quick buck today with no regard for tomorrow.

Because the vulnerability centralisation of mining creates has been solved by POS crypto-currencies.
Except for first mover advantage Bitcoin is already worthless/obsolete.

Bitcoin can either seriously try and fix the problem now, or be relegated to the dustbowl of history the next time there is a serious double spend attack.

Proof of Stake coins have been around long enough that if what you are saying is true, the market would already reflect this. Well... it doesn't.

Coins 3 (Peercoin) & 4 (NXT) have POS.

What will happen to Litecoin when scrypt-asics are released soon?
What will happen to NXT when it releases a one-click install client soon and not an eight step download?

I think the market does already reflects the strength of POS coming up & I think you will have NXT (only a few months old) sitting behind Bitcoin soon waiting for a double-spend attack for the market to make it obsolete.

What does POW do better than POS?

Except for looks I'm about as hot as a Sports Illustrated cover model. Get it?

And you are holding how many, and of what type, of coinage?

I'm asking because I wonder if you're full of hot air or actually have your head pulled out.

Bitcoin              70%
NXT        (POS)  20%
Bitshares (POS)  5%
Other               5%

Disclosure: I'm not very smart because included in the 'other' camp I also just bought 'Kittehcoin'  ??? Only because I can see a ridiculous Doge vs. Kitteh  battle starting next week...