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Title: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 12:22:12 PM 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 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool#Donating_to_P2Pool_miners) 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?
That's my pitch. Any input welcome. Some links: P2Pool Wiki article (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool) P2Pool thread on bitcointalk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313) Hashrate distribution, by pools (https://blockchain.info/pools) Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 12:33:49 PM 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. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 12:44:26 PM 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. 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? Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 12:48:12 PM Opinions are divided (to say the least) on how dangerous a single pool reaching 51% or more of hash power really is. Yes cents, of course I only have around 200gh/s so miners with higher hash rates get a larger share of donations.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 (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool#Donating_to_P2Pool_miners) 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?
That's my pitch. Any input welcome. Some links: P2Pool Wiki article (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool) P2Pool thread on bitcointalk (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313) Hashrate distribution, by pools (https://blockchain.info/pools) When a block is found, the 25btc (or close enough too) gets split 99.5% among the miners who have submitted shares based on how many shares they hashed and the one that actually finds the block gets the remaining 0.5% of the block reward. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: zimmah on June 27, 2014, 12:59:10 PM 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. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 01:02:13 PM Yes cents, of course I only have around 200gh/s so miners with higher hash rates get a larger share of donations. When a block is found, the 25btc (or close enough too) gets split 99.5% among the miners who have submitted shares based on how many shares they hashed and the one that actually finds the block gets the remaining 0.5% of the block reward. 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? Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 01:04:34 PM Yes cents, of course I only have around 200gh/s so miners with higher hash rates get a larger share of donations. When a block is found, the 25btc (or close enough too) gets split 99.5% among the miners who have submitted shares based on how many shares they hashed and the one that actually finds the block gets the remaining 0.5% of the block reward. 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? 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. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 01:05:48 PM 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 Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: sconklin321 on June 27, 2014, 02:48:19 PM Yes cents, of course I only have around 200gh/s so miners with higher hash rates get a larger share of donations. When a block is found, the 25btc (or close enough too) gets split 99.5% among the miners who have submitted shares based on how many shares they hashed and the one that actually finds the block gets the remaining 0.5% of the block reward. 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? 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. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 03:25:01 PM I'd still like to get some feedback from some of the large-ish holders that I know exist in this forum :D
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... Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 27, 2014, 04:40:51 PM I've been using p2pool for 6 months now and interestingly someone keeps sending me additional bonuses to my mining address:
Status: 84 confirmations Date: 27/06/2014 08:06 From: unknown To: 1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK (own address, label: Mining_06_2014) Credit: 0.00002588 BTC Net amount: +0.00002588 BTC Transaction ID: b11fd4e62df27c5ddd71c139603eed8006bfa298dced10632b5dd3281883055a-000 10 such transactions this month ~0.00025000 :D not much but I appreciate the support Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 04:47:57 PM I've been using p2pool for 6 months now and interestingly someone keeps sending me additional bonuses to my mining address: Status: 84 confirmations Date: 27/06/2014 08:06 From: unknown To: 1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK (own address, label: Mining_06_2014) Credit: 0.00002588 BTC Net amount: +0.00002588 BTC Transaction ID: b11fd4e62df27c5ddd71c139603eed8006bfa298dced10632b5dd3281883055a-000 10 such transactions this month ~0.00025000 :D not much but I appreciate the support Nice :) But that's exactly why I'd like to see the effort a bit more advertised, and perhaps bundled. More exposure means more donations are coming in, means miners become more aware of the incentives, means donators see their donation have an effect, etc. I'd hope to get some positive feedback loop going here... To get this started, I'll pledge contributing 1 btc to this effort (EDIT: to be clear, not your personally :D I meant as a donation to an address as described in my OP). But I'm still waiting for any non-miners to say what they think of this, and whether they care to make an effort as well (or maybe say that they did already). Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: JimboToronto on June 27, 2014, 04:51:46 PM There seem to be reasons why miners don't use p2pool more often yet. There are probably many reasons. Mine is laziness. I used the Easy Miner software that came with my BFL rig and it had single-click options for only Eclipse and Eligius. I chose the latter. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 27, 2014, 05:03:06 PM Actually P2Pool mining is really simple because you don't need to register any account anywhere. You can find existing P2pool nodes here:
http://p2pool.hostv.pl/ I use http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332/static/ for example. All one needs to do is to start the miner like that: ./bfgminer -o http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332 -u 1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK -p whatever where username is your receiving address and password can be anything. Also, people who wish to donate to P2P miners can go here: https://blockchain.info/blocks/P2Pool and they will see the latest blocks found by P2Pool. Clicking on any of the blocks gives you a list of addresses that participated in finding the block so a donations could be sent to the same addresses. If anyone is interested in monitoring your P2Pool mining effort, I created this Linux shell script that I can gladly share with you: Code: #!/bin/sh #When hashrate falls below `minimal_hashrate` the alarm goes off. minimal_hashrate=30 #Only if current time is more than `first_active_hour` the script can raise alarm. This is to be quiet during the night. first_active_hour=10 #To change the number of idle seconds after checking metrics modify the following variable: script_frequency=300 #P2Pool: pool_addr="http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332" btc_addr="1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK" #Helper variables: last_hash="" pool_fee="" first_run="yes" echo -en "\033]0;ASIC Stats\a" while : do hashrate=`curl -s $pool_addr'/local_stats' | grep -Po '"'$btc_addr'":(.+?),' | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d'.' -f 1` newest_hash=`curl -s $pool_addr'/recent_blocks' | grep -Po '"hash":(.+?),' | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d'"' -f 2` now=`date` hour=`date +%H` orig="$hashrate" if echo "$hashrate" | egrep -q '^[0-9]+$'; then hashrate=$(($hashrate/1000000000)) printf "%s: Hashrate: %-16s%8s " "$now" "\"$orig\"" "$hashrate GHs" else hashrate=0 printf "%s: %24s " "$now" "NO CONNECTION" fi if test "$minimal_hashrate" -gt "$hashrate" then printf "(\033[1;31m%s\033[0m)\n" 'FAIL' test "$hour" -gt "$first_active_hour" && (beep -l 350 -f 392 -D 100) else printf "(\033[1;32m%s\033[0m)\n" 'OK' fi if [ "$last_hash" != "$newest_hash" ] then if [ "$first_run" != "yes" ] then payout=`curl -s $pool_addr'/current_payouts' | grep -Po '"'$btc_addr'":(.+?),' | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d',' -f 1` pool_fee=`curl -s $pool_addr'/fee'` printf "\033[1;35m%s\033[0m\n" "$newest_hash" printf "Payout: \033[1;33m%46s\033[0m BTC\n" "+$payout" printf "Pool fee: \033[1;31m%46s\033[0m %%\n" "$pool_fee" test "$hour" -gt "$first_active_hour" && (beep -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 112 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 112 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 133 -n -l 600 -f 150 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 133 -n -l 600 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 168 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 133 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 168 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 133 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 75 -n -l 600 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 75 -n -l 600 -f 100) else printf "\033[1;35m%s\033[0m\n" "$newest_hash" fi last_hash=$newest_hash fi first_run="" sleep "$script_frequency" done The above script will play a PC speaker melody if the pool finds a block and it will make a single bleep if your miner is not producing enough GHashes per second. the beep command requires the PC speaker to be enabled however, which is another story. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hunterbunter on June 27, 2014, 05:24:09 PM 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? I set up http://blisterpool.com/p2pdonate about 3 weeks ago, at the bequest of a business owner who wanted an easy way to donate to "decentralized miners". His catch cry was "1% for decentralization", hoping to inspire other business owners to donate 1% of their weekly profits to something like p2pool so there was more incentive to mine on it. In my experience with p2pool (4-5 months), I've not seen a single donation. I don't know how much as gone through prior to that. After presenting the tool, there was a flurry of donations totally about 2.5 btc so far (across 43 donations, to lots of miners), with the highest being 1.0 btc. Donations have died off somewhat the last week, but they still come in every now and then. I also posted the source on github, and noticed maybe half a dozen or so donations that didn't go through my tool. I'd estimate it was around 0.5 btc through those. I do think that investors and businesses have a vested interest in regularly donating to p2pool mining...if the blockchain fails, all their assets fail with it. 1% for decentralization is a great idea, and if enough people start thinking about it, p2pool should far out pay any other pool, and that's all the real incentive miners need. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 05:28:24 PM 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? I set up http://blisterpool.com/p2pdonate about 3 weeks ago, at the bequest of a business owner who wanted an easy way to donate to "decentralized miners". His catch cry was "1% for decentralization", hoping to inspire other business owners to donate 1% of their weekly profits to something like p2pool so there was more incentive to mine on it. In my experience with p2pool (4-5 months), I've not seen a single donation. I don't know how much as gone through prior to that. After presenting the tool, there was a flurry of donations totally about 2.5 btc so far (across 43 donations, to lots of miners), with the highest being 1.0 btc. Donations have died off somewhat the last week, but they still come in every now and then. I also posted the source on github, and noticed maybe half a dozen or so donations that didn't go through my tool. I'd estimate it was around 0.5 btc through those. I do think that investors and businesses have a vested interest in regularly donating to p2pool mining...if the blockchain fails, all their assets fail with it. 1% for decentralization is a great idea, and if enough people start thinking about it, p2pool should far out pay any other pool, and that's all the real incentive miners need. Thanks. Very interesting That's kind of what I'm afraid of... individual donations coming in, but no sustained awareness yet that this should be a thing for everyone who holds a relevant stake in Bitcoin and ever wondered if 51% hashpower in the hands of one conventional pool is maybe not such a great idea. (EDIT) One other remark: once p2pool gets big enough, variance should be less of an issue than it is now, so donations would be needed only to *sustain* miners staying in p2pool, while currently we need to give extra incentives to them in order for them to *join* the pool (because for reasons of high variance when mining with a low total hashrate, they would possibly better served to join a larger pool). Correct? Donation drive / request for comments from investors still continuing :D My own pledge (1 btc) still stands. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: calian on June 27, 2014, 06:22:44 PM 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. How about listen to the actual miner who commented here? It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. That would suggest to me that donations would be better spent paying developers to implement the kind of interface that miners want. Something that reduces their headaches. It makes sense that large pools would have the resources to provide this kind of thing whereas P2P being a decentralized open source tool probably still requires the command line to get running. What we need is the Ubuntu (company) for P2Pool. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Raystonn on June 27, 2014, 06:28:48 PM 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. How about listen to the actual miner who commented here? It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. That would suggest to me that donations would be better spent paying developers to implement the kind of interface that miners want. Something that reduces their headaches. It makes sense that large pools would have the resources to provide this kind of thing whereas P2P being a decentralized open source tool probably still requires the command line to get running. What we need is the Ubuntu (company) for P2Pool. Presumably whoever created P2Pool had a motivation that also encompasses seeing miners actually adopt it. If so, that motivation should translate into development on such features if they believe these features are needed to further adoption of P2Pool. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: xDan on June 27, 2014, 06:43:06 PM 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. How about listen to the actual miner who commented here? It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. That would suggest to me that donations would be better spent paying developers to implement the kind of interface that miners want. Something that reduces their headaches. It makes sense that large pools would have the resources to provide this kind of thing whereas P2P being a decentralized open source tool probably still requires the command line to get running. What we need is the Ubuntu (company) for P2Pool. +1million, any donations should go to further development of this P2Pool. I'm not a miner so no nothing about p2pool and have never used it but typically open source software is ass backwards as fuck to use compared to commercial... Would happily donate some small amount to concrete and well defined enhancement proposals for this p2pool. This is the initiative that is needed. - poll miners, why do they prefer GHash, whatever - distil this into some concrete proposals for improving p2pool (or e.g. creation of additional services/apps for this "monitoring hashrate" or w/e) - crowd fund these [and also find some qualified bitcoin devs / community members who can say that P2Pool is actually the solution here, because I have no freaking idea!] P.S., why isn't this in the main Bitcoin Discussion forum? It needs more attention. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 07:14:08 PM 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. How about listen to the actual miner who commented here? It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. That would suggest to me that donations would be better spent paying developers to implement the kind of interface that miners want. Something that reduces their headaches. It makes sense that large pools would have the resources to provide this kind of thing whereas P2P being a decentralized open source tool probably still requires the command line to get running. What we need is the Ubuntu (company) for P2Pool. +1million, any donations should go to further development of this P2Pool. I'm not a miner so no nothing about p2pool and have never used it but typically open source software is ass backwards as fuck to use compared to commercial... Would happily donate some small amount to concrete and well defined enhancement proposals for this p2pool. This is the initiative that is needed. - poll miners, why do they prefer GHash, whatever - distil this into some concrete proposals for improving p2pool (or e.g. creation of additional services/apps for this "monitoring hashrate" or w/e) - crowd fund these [and also find some qualified bitcoin devs / community members who can say that P2Pool is actually the solution here, because I have no freaking idea!] P.S., why isn't this in the main Bitcoin Discussion forum? It needs more attention. I'd welcome opening this discussion on the main discussion forum, but the speculation subforum is pretty big as well, and as I hinted at in the title, I'm especially interested in the opinion of larger stakeholders on this matter, i.e. those who hold large positions in BTC. The speculation forum seemed like a good place to get a reaction from them, only, so far nobody picked up that invitation. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 07:24:26 PM It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. As a long time supporter of P2Pool I will say that this is the most important step. Imagine if it was integrated into the reference client. Imagine if you could start mining directly to an address you control simply by plugging in your ASIC device and clicking a "start mining" button. Let's say it is (integrated into the reference client -- which wouldn't be that easy to achieve actually, probably a bit of a hot topic to do that). Would that actually help? It was my understanding many miners aren't even using the reference client, so what would the impact be? Correct me please, if I'm wrong. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 27, 2014, 07:25:39 PM It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go. As a long time supporter of P2Pool I will say that this is the most important step. Imagine if it was integrated into the reference client. Imagine if you could start mining directly to an address you control simply by plugging in your ASIC device and clicking a "start mining" button. Reference client integration is a nice idea. A GUI wrapper for the miner software would be a cool too. The GUI would automatically connect to a P2Pool for example. It can definitely be done and it would be even more convenient than mining for whatever other pool (mainly because P2Pool does not require any form of user account registration, ever). Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: xDan on June 27, 2014, 09:11:45 PM Those already using P2Pool are not necessarily those best suited to suggesting enhancements. The most useful opinions might be from those, like zimmah, who currently use GHash and don't want to switch. They are the target, right?
I'm especially interested in the opinion of larger stakeholders on this matter, i.e. those who hold large positions in BTC. The speculation forum seemed like a good place to get a reaction from them, only, so far nobody picked up that invitation. Define "large position" ;)I think the really big holders are too busy sitting in their castles to comment or fund something important like this... pffft, most people are just mindless speculators with little care or understanding of the underlying technology. Tragedy of the commons and all that. /pessimism Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 10:05:46 PM The lead developer showed renewed interest very recently and has become more active on github and the forum. There are some technical issues to sort in regards to scalability and hardware compatibility.
I've done some work on the front end, again in my sig. You can run a p2pool node on Windows by simply running the executable and pointing your miner at it or just finding a node close by. It's pretty easy and knowing some decent donations are coming in and understanding variance would make it easier for miners to make the change. Now for some real work figures: In the last 2 weeks p2pool hash rate has dropped significantly, from 700th/s to now around 300gh/s, this happened just as the main dev became more active. Since in that same two weeks p2pool only got a block every the days or more I can only assume miners got impatient with the variance and switched pools, big mistake! In the last 36 hours five blocks were found. At around 230gh/s I've got around $15/block on those last blocks. Over $60us in payments on only 230gh/s is pretty nice and throughout those two weeks we got a dozen or so donations, each quite small but its a nice little fill in to keep you interested while blocks are not coming in. If the donations were a little larger, they could certainly help reduce variance and make miners feel better about staying with p2pool during times between blocks. There is a bounty address setup for the main dev for when he delivers some new code and nodes can donate (turned on by default but often disabled, the last block for example had a 1% donation turned on) so if miners understood the 1% fee and the developer is inspired to spend more time improving code then the system self reciprocates to the dev. The 1% is turned off to help encourage miners to use p2pool nodes, my node has no fees for example. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hunterbunter on June 27, 2014, 10:14:57 PM That's kind of what I'm afraid of... individual donations coming in, but no sustained awareness yet that this should be a thing for everyone who holds a relevant stake in Bitcoin and ever wondered if 51% hashpower in the hands of one conventional pool is maybe not such a great idea. (EDIT) One other remark: once p2pool gets big enough, variance should be less of an issue than it is now, so donations would be needed only to *sustain* miners staying in p2pool, while currently we need to give extra incentives to them in order for them to *join* the pool (because for reasons of high variance when mining with a low total hashrate, they would possibly better served to join a larger pool). Correct? Yes, education on blockchain 'insurance' is key for asset holders. There have been several discussions on reddit about this, and one comment which stood out was that P2Pool was not yet scalable. If a ton of people joined p2pool (like 50% of the network), the sharechain difficulty goes through the roof, and finding a share will become very difficult...so it'll be like solo mining blocks all over again, except slightly easier with lesser reward since it's still split (so still less variance than pure solo mining). Regarding hashrates, yes you are correct. There is still the problem of p2pool share difficulty getting too high for 'low speed' miners, but the dev (Forrestv) is considering solutions to that, like multiple sharechains, etc. I'm also thinking about ways to create a hybrid node. A centralized node, if you will, running on the P2Pool network. This will allow me to create services similar to the other centralized pools (whatever people especially like about GHash), while still making them indirectly mine on p2pool. There's still the risk of the hybrid pool growing too large (eg >51% of the sharechain), but that's a serious problem already...Petamine were going to trial p2pool, but it looks like they didn't, because they would immediately have had >50% of p2pool's mining power. Things like hybrid nodes would be more useful when there are large mining groups on p2pool, so smaller miners could still turn a coin. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 10:15:39 PM Here is my transaction list for my measly 230gh/s over the last two and a bit days. Hope this inspires some miners to join:
Today 01:35:48 0.02183437 BTC 2014-06-27 15:06:28 - donation 0.00011201 BTC 2014-06-27 01:18:02 0.02453485 BTC 2014-06-26 19:59:57 0.02434502 BTC 2014-06-26 15:01:00 - donation 0.00010977 2014-06-26 07:07:09 0.02488561 BTC 2014-06-25 18:42:54 0.01801932 BTC 2014-06-25 15:01:48 - Donation 0.00009016 BTC Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 10:49:25 PM Those already using P2Pool are not necessarily those best suited to suggesting enhancements. The most useful opinions might be from those, like zimmah, who currently use GHash and don't want to switch. They are the target, right? I'm especially interested in the opinion of larger stakeholders on this matter, i.e. those who hold large positions in BTC. The speculation forum seemed like a good place to get a reaction from them, only, so far nobody picked up that invitation. Define "large position" ;)I think the really big holders are too busy sitting in their castles to comment or fund something important like this... pffft, most people are just mindless speculators with little care or understanding of the underlying technology. Tragedy of the commons and all that. /pessimism Don't really want to force anyone here to reveal his net worth, it's a tricky subject. So I understand it's better done in a don't ask, don't tell manner, but like I wrote above, I know from the discussions in here that there's a decent number of 100+ BTC holders on this forum, which is what I'd call a large(ish) BTC position, agreed? But in the end, it doesn't really matter how many coins you have, the idea would be that if you have a stake in it, you should be motivated out of rational self interest to keep the network decentralized (as much as possible at least). Donating, say, around 0.1% of your BTC worth to a cause like this seems reasonable to me. So, say if you're sitting on around 100 coins, that means donating 0.1 coins. At a total of around 1000, 1 coin. I'd expect we could get a pretty decent amount of donations together like that, if people are convinced it's a worthy cause. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: byronbb on June 27, 2014, 10:51:44 PM I was thinking that eventually bitcoin holders may have to actually mine at a small loss in order to protect their coins. This would then mean bitcoin would be a depreciating asset? Once we see a leveling of the hash rate my hope is mining will return to the beginnings when individuals could run machines at home and collectively "donate" hashes for the collective. As long as enough people did this it would be effective.
Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 27, 2014, 10:56:13 PM Yes, education on blockchain 'insurance' is key for asset holders. There have been several discussions on reddit about this, and one comment which stood out was that P2Pool was not yet scalable. If a ton of people joined p2pool (like 50% of the network), the sharechain difficulty goes through the roof, and finding a share will become very difficult...so it'll be like solo mining blocks all over again, except slightly easier with lesser reward since it's still split (so still less variance than pure solo mining). Regarding hashrates, yes you are correct. There is still the problem of p2pool share difficulty getting too high for 'low speed' miners, but the dev (Forrestv) is considering solutions to that, like multiple sharechains, etc. I'm also thinking about ways to create a hybrid node. A centralized node, if you will, running on the P2Pool network. This will allow me to create services similar to the other centralized pools (whatever people especially like about GHash), while still making them indirectly mine on p2pool. There's still the risk of the hybrid pool growing too large (eg >51% of the sharechain), but that's a serious problem already...Petamine were going to trial p2pool, but it looks like they didn't, because they would immediately have had >50% of p2pool's mining power. Things like hybrid nodes would be more useful when there are large mining groups on p2pool, so smaller miners could still turn a coin. Thanks for another really interesting post. Alright, so that's something I didn't know: that p2pool doesn't scale that well yet assuming a big increase in hash rate. Is this solvable, in the near/mid future? Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: norgan on June 27, 2014, 10:57:49 PM Yes, education on blockchain 'insurance' is key for asset holders. There have been several discussions on reddit about this, and one comment which stood out was that P2Pool was not yet scalable. If a ton of people joined p2pool (like 50% of the network), the sharechain difficulty goes through the roof, and finding a share will become very difficult...so it'll be like solo mining blocks all over again, except slightly easier with lesser reward since it's still split (so still less variance than pure solo mining). Regarding hashrates, yes you are correct. There is still the problem of p2pool share difficulty getting too high for 'low speed' miners, but the dev (Forrestv) is considering solutions to that, like multiple sharechains, etc. I'm also thinking about ways to create a hybrid node. A centralized node, if you will, running on the P2Pool network. This will allow me to create services similar to the other centralized pools (whatever people especially like about GHash), while still making them indirectly mine on p2pool. There's still the risk of the hybrid pool growing too large (eg >51% of the sharechain), but that's a serious problem already...Petamine were going to trial p2pool, but it looks like they didn't, because they would immediately have had >50% of p2pool's mining power. Things like hybrid nodes would be more useful when there are large mining groups on p2pool, so smaller miners could still turn a coin. Thanks for another really interesting post. Alright, so that's something I didn't know: that p2pool doesn't scale that well yet assuming a big increase in hash rate. Is this solvable, in the near/mid future? Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: spooderman on June 28, 2014, 09:43:07 AM excellent thread. I will gladly donate 100mbtc/0.1btc to the effort. I currently mine on eligius but I have 6gh. I do next to nothing, and from what I understand, I'm too small a fish to use p2pool.
Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: xDan on June 28, 2014, 11:31:10 AM But in the end, it doesn't really matter how many coins you have, the idea would be that if you have a stake in it, you should be motivated out of rational self interest to keep the network decentralized (as much as possible at least). Donating, say, around 0.1% of your BTC worth to a cause like this seems reasonable to me. So, say if you're sitting on around 100 coins, that means donating 0.1 coins. At a total of around 1000, 1 coin. I'd expect we could get a pretty decent amount of donations together like that, if people are convinced it's a worthy cause. That all sounds great. I would donate maybe 0.5% - 1% of my stake to some concrete p2pool improvement proposals, that had been suggested (and voted on) by miners and GHash users. I would not donate any directly to miners though as I don't see that being a long term solution. It probably bears waiting to see about this scalability issue before actually soliciting donations though. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: sickpig on June 28, 2014, 01:14:07 PM Actually P2Pool mining is really simple because you don't need to register any account anywhere. You can find existing P2pool nodes here: http://p2pool.hostv.pl/ I use http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332/static/ for example. So you're not using your own full node? Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 28, 2014, 01:41:47 PM But in the end, it doesn't really matter how many coins you have, the idea would be that if you have a stake in it, you should be motivated out of rational self interest to keep the network decentralized (as much as possible at least). Donating, say, around 0.1% of your BTC worth to a cause like this seems reasonable to me. So, say if you're sitting on around 100 coins, that means donating 0.1 coins. At a total of around 1000, 1 coin. I'd expect we could get a pretty decent amount of donations together like that, if people are convinced it's a worthy cause. That all sounds great. I would donate maybe 0.5% - 1% of my stake to some concrete p2pool improvement proposals, that had been suggested (and voted on) by miners and GHash users. I would not donate any directly to miners though as I don't see that being a long term solution. It probably bears waiting to see about this scalability issue before actually soliciting donations though. Valid point. On the other hand, as I argued above, there is currently a "bootstrapping" that any smaller pool faces: while the pool is still small, variance is high for participating miners, so they are inclined to join a bigger pool, which in turn is less affected by variance, thus attracting more miners, etc. That's why I said above, in the *early* phase of supporting p2pool, it might be necessary to counter that variance disincentive by additional donations, so that more miners join p2pool, which in turn will mitigate the problem and will (long term) make donations less important. EDIT: Latching onto what calian and holliday discussed... is p2pool integration into the reference client, in one slick package, an option? Something the devs are considering? That might gain some support from donators. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 28, 2014, 01:46:11 PM Actually P2Pool mining is really simple because you don't need to register any account anywhere. You can find existing P2pool nodes here: http://p2pool.hostv.pl/ I use http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332/static/ for example. So you're not using your own full node? Nope, but from the documents I can see that a node is also really simple to set up. I pay 0.5% fee to the node operator which I don't consider too much. Are you aware of any other advantages that running my own node would give me? I wouldn't be able to accept other miners working under my P2Pool node anyway because I have a dynamic IP address. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: sickpig on June 28, 2014, 03:33:28 PM Actually P2Pool mining is really simple because you don't need to register any account anywhere. You can find existing P2pool nodes here: http://p2pool.hostv.pl/ I use http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332/static/ for example. So you're not using your own full node? Nope, but from the documents I can see that a node is also really simple to set up. I pay 0.5% fee to the node operator which I don't consider too much. Are you aware of any other advantages that running my own node would give me? I wouldn't be able to accept other miners working under my P2Pool node anyway because I have a dynamic IP address. I'd say that the main advantage to run your own node is you don't need to trust your node operator. Other than that I see no other pros, modulo fee, since you can't give access to others. Now that I think about it running a node is a good thing for the btc network in general (the higher the number of nodes the better). Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 28, 2014, 05:31:31 PM Guys?
Did your future hashrate just increase by factor 4? :D This: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/29btmp/peta_will_switch_to_p2pool_after_96_voted_yes/ plus: http://www.peta-mine.co/stats/ and: http://p2pool.info/ seems to say that much. I guess this is a concern: [...]Petamine were going to trial p2pool, but it looks like they didn't, because they would immediately have had >50% of p2pool's mining power. Things like hybrid nodes would be more useful when there are large mining groups on p2pool, so smaller miners could still turn a coin. But maybe something that can be fixed after they join? EDIT: "factor 4" because they would be going from currently 380 TH/s to 1190+380 TH/s. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: zimmah on June 28, 2014, 07:20:08 PM Actually P2Pool mining is really simple because you don't need to register any account anywhere. You can find existing P2pool nodes here: http://p2pool.hostv.pl/ I use http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332/static/ for example. All one needs to do is to start the miner like that: ./bfgminer -o http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332 -u 1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK -p whatever where username is your receiving address and password can be anything. Also, people who wish to donate to P2P miners can go here: https://blockchain.info/blocks/P2Pool and they will see the latest blocks found by P2Pool. Clicking on any of the blocks gives you a list of addresses that participated in finding the block so a donations could be sent to the same addresses. If anyone is interested in monitoring your P2Pool mining effort, I created this Linux shell script that I can gladly share with you: Code: #!/bin/sh #When hashrate falls below `minimal_hashrate` the alarm goes off. minimal_hashrate=30 #Only if current time is more than `first_active_hour` the script can raise alarm. This is to be quiet during the night. first_active_hour=10 #To change the number of idle seconds after checking metrics modify the following variable: script_frequency=300 #P2Pool: pool_addr="http://pool.fabulouspanda.co.uk:9332" btc_addr="1DmMArx84zA6fpAsvDzrR1hsjnFgC5h6EK" #Helper variables: last_hash="" pool_fee="" first_run="yes" echo -en "\033]0;ASIC Stats\a" while : do hashrate=`curl -s $pool_addr'/local_stats' | grep -Po '"'$btc_addr'":(.+?),' | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d'.' -f 1` newest_hash=`curl -s $pool_addr'/recent_blocks' | grep -Po '"hash":(.+?),' | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d'"' -f 2` now=`date` hour=`date +%H` orig="$hashrate" if echo "$hashrate" | egrep -q '^[0-9]+$'; then hashrate=$(($hashrate/1000000000)) printf "%s: Hashrate: %-16s%8s " "$now" "\"$orig\"" "$hashrate GHs" else hashrate=0 printf "%s: %24s " "$now" "NO CONNECTION" fi if test "$minimal_hashrate" -gt "$hashrate" then printf "(\033[1;31m%s\033[0m)\n" 'FAIL' test "$hour" -gt "$first_active_hour" && (beep -l 350 -f 392 -D 100) else printf "(\033[1;32m%s\033[0m)\n" 'OK' fi if [ "$last_hash" != "$newest_hash" ] then if [ "$first_run" != "yes" ] then payout=`curl -s $pool_addr'/current_payouts' | grep -Po '"'$btc_addr'":(.+?),' | cut -d' ' -f 2 | cut -d',' -f 1` pool_fee=`curl -s $pool_addr'/fee'` printf "\033[1;35m%s\033[0m\n" "$newest_hash" printf "Payout: \033[1;33m%46s\033[0m BTC\n" "+$payout" printf "Pool fee: \033[1;31m%46s\033[0m %%\n" "$pool_fee" test "$hour" -gt "$first_active_hour" && (beep -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 112 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 112 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 133 -n -l 600 -f 150 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 133 -n -l 600 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 168 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 133 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 168 -n -l 150 -f 150 -n -l 150 -f 133 -n -l 300 -f 126 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 75 -n -l 600 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 100 -n -l 300 -f 75 -n -l 600 -f 100) else printf "\033[1;35m%s\033[0m\n" "$newest_hash" fi last_hash=$newest_hash fi first_run="" sleep "$script_frequency" done The above script will play a PC speaker melody if the pool finds a block and it will make a single bleep if your miner is not producing enough GHashes per second. the beep command requires the PC speaker to be enabled however, which is another story. Well, that is a start, but my miners are in a room no one really ever enters, and i would prefer not having to actually enter the room and look every time if my miner is still running or not. I would prefer being able to see it from a browser plugin (on another computer), or on my phone. Or both. Many of you here discus profitability, while miners obviously care about profit, ease of use is also a very important issue. I can't be the only one who does not want or is even unable to physically check up on their miner on a regular basis. And like I also said before, options like splitting the coins between multiple wallets without having to think about it would also be very handy to have. Most of the popular mining pools offer many tools and utilities that, as far as i know of, P2P lacks. I would join P2P pool even if they would not give donations, just to ensure security of the network, but so far only the most popular pools offer the kind of utility i want to have. The popular pools are popular for a reason guys, and that reason is not just less variance and lower fees. I am perfectly aware of the risk of Ghash being too big, but like i already stated and has been quoted several times, i just want to set up my miner once and forget about it, and as long as i can't do that with P2P, P2P just is not an option no matter what rewards they promise. I have other things to do than worry about my miner. Of course i'm just one miner out of many but i can't be the only one who thinks like this. Btw i know how cgminer and such work, (some miners may not know, but you can probably assume most miners know). I was thinking that eventually bitcoin holders may have to actually mine at a small loss in order to protect their coins. This would then mean bitcoin would be a depreciating asset? Once we see a leveling of the hash rate my hope is mining will return to the beginnings when individuals could run machines at home and collectively "donate" hashes for the collective. As long as enough people did this it would be effective. that worked when all of the home miners were technologically capable. Imagine what would happen if literally every home computer would mine. It would only take 1 zombie botnet to attack the blockchain. It's not as good an idea as it sounds, you can't expect to educate billions of people. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 28, 2014, 07:42:13 PM Well, that is a start, but my miners are in a room no one really ever enters, and i would prefer not having to actually enter the room and look every time if my miner is still running or not. I would prefer being able to see it from a browser plugin (on another computer), or on my phone. Or both. YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG! My miner is 20 km from me. I barely never check the host laptop and the miner itself is in a separate room of its own. The script can run in any computer that has Internet connection and it will produce sound alerts and it displays the hash rate in every 5 minutes. Everything you said is just wrong but I guess it was my fault not to express myself clearly enough. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: OgNasty on June 28, 2014, 07:46:56 PM Just thought I'd mention that NastyFans is working on ways to improve p2pool live earnings statistics, improve the payout system, and implement additional incentives to make it not only a more responsible way to mine, but more profitable as well.
I don't think it needs to be easier to use. P2Pool is already the easiest pool to use. You don't even have to sign up. All you have to do is point your miner to nastyfans.org:9332 and use your Bitcoin address for your username. Pretty simple. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: zimmah on June 28, 2014, 07:53:39 PM Well, that is a start, but my miners are in a room no one really ever enters, and i would prefer not having to actually enter the room and look every time if my miner is still running or not. I would prefer being able to see it from a browser plugin (on another computer), or on my phone. Or both. YOU GOT IT ALL WRONG! My miner is 20 km from me. I barely never check the host laptop and the miner itself is in a separate room of its own. The script can run in any computer that has Internet connection and it will produce sound alerts and it displays the hash rate in every 5 minutes. Everything you said is just wrong but I guess it was my fault not to express myself clearly enough. well, i'm sorry for not being as good with computers as you, or probably 95% of the forum users here. But such improvements are the thing i am indeed looking for. 1) Checking up on my miner from a distance, preferably from within a browser plugin or an app. https://i.imgur.com/2zHNRiM.png 2) Splitting the income between multiple wallets (for example 49% to wallet A, 49% to wallet B and 2% to wallet C) If these two options are easily done in P2P (not to many steps to set it up, and not require too much knowledge, or a very, very detailed guide on how to do it) and it only requires setting it up once then i would seriously mine at P2P without problems. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 28, 2014, 08:15:00 PM well, i'm sorry for not being as good with computers as you, or probably 95% of the forum users here. But such improvements are the thing i am indeed looking for. 1) Checking up on my miner from a distance, preferably from within a browser plugin or an app. https://i.imgur.com/2zHNRiM.png 2) Splitting the income between multiple wallets (for example 49% to wallet A, 49% to wallet B and 2% to wallet C) If these two options are easily done in P2P (not to many steps to set it up, and not require too much knowledge, or a very, very detailed guide on how to do it) and it only requires setting it up once then i would seriously mine at P2P without problems. Ok, no problem, I am aware of the fact that I feel no empathy for the non-programmers and thus set too high expectations. What I see from your suggestions is that P2Pool just needs a GUI. There should be a website that would allow monitoring P2Pool miners, essentially doing the same thing that my shell script does but in a web browser. The P2Pool node should also have a GUI that would allow sending mined bitcoins to multiple wallets by using Bitcoin daemon's RPC. Programming-wise, these are both very trivial tasks. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: zimmah on June 28, 2014, 08:26:38 PM well, i'm sorry for not being as good with computers as you, or probably 95% of the forum users here. But such improvements are the thing i am indeed looking for. 1) Checking up on my miner from a distance, preferably from within a browser plugin or an app. https://i.imgur.com/2zHNRiM.png 2) Splitting the income between multiple wallets (for example 49% to wallet A, 49% to wallet B and 2% to wallet C) If these two options are easily done in P2P (not to many steps to set it up, and not require too much knowledge, or a very, very detailed guide on how to do it) and it only requires setting it up once then i would seriously mine at P2P without problems. Ok, no problem, I am aware of the fact that I feel no empathy for the non-programmers and thus set too high expectations. What I see from your suggestions is that P2Pool just needs a GUI. There should be a website that would allow monitoring P2Pool miners, essentially doing the same thing that my shell script does but in a web browser. The P2Pool node should also have a GUI that would allow sending mined bitcoins to multiple wallets by using Bitcoin daemon's RPC. Programming-wise, these are both very trivial tasks. correct, that would make it useful to me, and hopefully many more miners. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: oda.krell on June 28, 2014, 08:32:20 PM Hehe, Hyena. You're resourceful, but a bit abrasive, huh?
Anyway, thanks for being the voice of a "majority miner", zimmah. Invaluable input, really. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: ErisDiscordia on June 28, 2014, 09:01:02 PM Thanks for bringing this to our attention oda.krell.
This is a worthy cause and I would very much like to contribute towards donations for p2pool miners. And the development of the platform as well. Come to think of it, "voluntary donations by holders of Bitcoin" might become a third monetary incentive for mining besides the block reward and the transaction fees. Of course the transaction fees (in that you can voluntarily specify them) are a form of donations as well, but we are talking about providing a monetary incentive not for mining in general, but for the right kind of mining, right? :D Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 28, 2014, 09:20:34 PM I could develop the website that allows monitoring P2Pool miners. I would do it in JavaScript totally browser based and it would log the hash rate of the specified receiving address periodically. It could also play music or make bleeps when a payout is made or the hash rate decreases under the preferred threshold. For starters, such functionality would be fair enough, don't you think? Further enhancements such as automated SMS sending and e-mails could be considered later.
Of course, there may be other more talented or enthusiastic developers out there, ready to do the job. All I wanted to say is that we have the potential resources to do it. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: zimmah on June 29, 2014, 09:24:59 AM That is good to know, thank you for your effort.
I would be glad to see a safer distribution of hashrate Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 29, 2014, 12:35:41 PM If anyone is interested in looking what P2Pool developers have been doing lately, then browse around their github page:
https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/graphs I believe anyone can contribute to the development and if new functionality gets implemented one must just make another pull request. How the contributors get their share of the donations remains unknown to me. I suspect a better idea is to fund individual features to be implemented rather than P2Pool development as a whole. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: romneymoney on June 29, 2014, 01:57:41 PM Why not just change the line with the beep to
echo "$info"|mail -s "Dead Bitcoin Miner" $email and for $email, suggest a mobile gateway so the user can get a SMS alert. Title: Re: Should we (the investors, I mean) help incentivize p2pool? Post by: Hyena on June 29, 2014, 02:30:49 PM Why not just change the line with the beep to echo "$info"|mail -s "Dead Bitcoin Miner" $email and for $email, suggest a mobile gateway so the user can get a SMS alert. Yes, for programmers that would be the way to go. I personally don't need sms nor e-mail notifications and thus I did not implement the functionality. |
