p2pool.info not working?

I see two recent blocks that don't show up.

That is a good plan. If you want absolutely the lowest variance, you should divide your hash rate between pools according to their share of the network. If you want highest expected ROI you should choose the pools with the lowest fee (and payout of transaction fees and/or merge-mined coins) and the lowest risk of getting ripped off (either by the pool or the pool itself getting ripped off). The gold standard for the latter is running your own p2pool node (or solo mining of course).  In reality you probably want something in between, which comes close to the mix described, although I also wouldn't rule out some small share on ghash, say 10-20%.

Most of the drop in seat price is just a mirror image of the increase in bitcoin price. In dollar terms the seats are right around where they were a year ago.

No that won't work. Even one incoming connection will still periodically (and not infrequently) be used to download the blockchain in my experience, and when this happens it really hurts your p2pool performance and earnings. The reason zero is an effective setting here is that it disables block chain downloads. If you don't like people doing it this way, convince the bitcoin developers to add a feature to directly limit blockchain downloads.

I understand the effect on bitcoin peer-to-peer and that is a downside, but it is a tradeoff you have to make if you want to efficiently run a p2pool node with limited resources.

What you can do if you want to help the bitcoin p2p, and what I do myself, is allow incoming connections on another node (on a different network) where you don't care about the performance impact the way you do for p2pool. Keep the p2pool node quiet.

It would be nice if there were better tuning options on bitcoin to rate-limit people using your node to download the blockchain, and likewise if bitcoin were able to download the blockchain from multiple sources (bittorrent style) to put less load on each individual source, but neither of those features exist currently.

Block incoming connections (or if you have a firewall, just don't forward the port) to bitcoind. That will prevent people from using your node to download the blockchain. In my experience that is the single most important tuning item.

The entire system I have running a bitcoin node and p2pool uses well under 20 W. You need to go back to the drawing board.

Come on man, its a family business of sorts and actors often do other work in between gigs. Would she seem more authentic if she were waiting tables?

(Assuming everything is as it appears, which you never know in this space.)

I'd guess that absolutely nothing has kept pace with hash rate. Number of miners, number of users etc. In fact not even bitcoin value. The big driver there is more advanced ASIC technology.

As far as the number of miners compared to the number of bitcoin nodes, I have no idea. Both have consolidated as things have become a bit more centralized I would guess.

To be fair it says that right on their page, so in a sense you are verifying their claimed identities...

EDIT: https://cgov.sos.state.ga.us/Account.aspx/ViewEntityData?entityId=4822146

How can we independently verify any of that, and how will you be held accountable if it turns out not to be true?

Are you posting proof of your physical identity and assets so if it turns out that you are ripping people off, they can easily sue you? Are you posting a bond?

You realize that every ponzi operator says "I'm not running a ponzi scheme" so that alone can't ever be used to tell the difference between legitimate operators (if there even are any -- I have my doubts) and fraudulent ones.

Demonstrate clearly and verifiably why you (especially YOU with your "Activity: 6") should be trusted or expect people such as me to continue warning people not to trust you.

People are buying seats all the time. Where did you get that crazy (and incorrect) idea?

Massive is relative. By your definition $1 would be "massively more" than $0.01 ("It's 100 times more!") but its still only a dollar.

As I said, if you are running a bitcoin node already, the added cost running a p2pool node is minimal. Certainly not everyone does have a bitcoin node.

The risk is much lower because the pool never holds the coins. You can verify -- independently (try that on a centralized pool) -- that your shares are being accepted (and will be paid) by looking at the current payouts on any other public node. Even eligius, which claims to make coinbase payouts, has had a huge amount of coins going to their own wallets recently. So far all of those coins have been paid out (if slowly) but this makes them a big target for hackers and exposes everyone to the risk of large operator errors. At times there has been over 3000 BTC being held and paid out "manually."

The other reason it is unlikely you get ripped off by a public node is that each public node tends to be very small. There is so little incentive to be gained by a public node operator skimming a small number of shares it's very unlikely to ever happen. Skimming a tiny (or maybe even not so tiny) amount from a big pool, by contrast, might well be enough to get rich.


That's one reason, but not the only reason. Guaranteed coinbase payouts are another reason, and potentially lower fees (not compared to ghash.io but compared to nearly all of the others).

If a few large miners do care about protecting the network, and a bit of a nudge can get them using p2pool, that too can make a difference.

How does this "demonstrate" that you aren't a ponzi? It doesn't. At best it means nothing, at worst it is bait meant to lure in even more investors/suckers. You realize that practically every ponzi scheme in the history of the world started out with some good returns early. That's what lures brings in the suckers and makes the scheme work.

That's valid feedback here. It doesn't help recruit people to use the p2pool software that exists today. For that matter, I'm not a p2pool developer, so for that reason alone it isn't useful or on-topic feedback on my thread. Give your "advice" to them (or better yet contribute), not me.


Please see the FUD-repellant thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0) and stop spreading it. P2pool doesn't require "a lot" of effort or resources. I did so for in a few hours on hardware that cost me a few hundred dollars (a tiny fraction of what I've spent on miners), and it is probably possible to use cheaper hardware or run on existing hardware in many cases. That's a small price to pay for for the benefits of immunity from the risks of pools being dishonest, getting hacked, or just having screw ups.

In fact it doesn't require any resources at all since you can use an existing public node.

I do agree it isn't suitable for small miners due to the need to run a bitcoin node, although some people do that anyway. The p2pool part itself is minimal.

I built bfgminer for the RPi from the github source last year, and updated it a few times. No problems at all. Worked great as a proxy for my blades (until I sold them off and upgraded to newer mining gear).

The problem you run up against is shipping costs. At current prices shipping makes up a significant portion of the price of the S1. Time to move on to bigger and better things.

If you really want 1/5 of an S2 you should start or join a group buy.

And what assurances can you give that you are creditworthy so people should send you their money and trust you to send something back? Are you posting proof of your physical identity and assets so if it turns out that you are ripping people off, they can easily sue you? Are you posting a bond?

What have you done to credibly demonstrate your trustworthiness?

Because after all you have to give back your referral fees if it turns out to be a scam and people lose their money right?

Are you using one of the new ASICs that I mentioned earlier? The real fix is to natively support longpolling or stratum (or shorter rounds), as the recent ASICs do. Otherwise, your ASIC will just not work well with any pool or coin with fast rounds.

As much a supporter of p2pool I might be, I'd suggest you move that hardware elsewhere if it can't be fixed. When I was running older ASICs I tried p2pool and then stopped using it. Wasn't fixable given the latency inherent in the hardware.


Which modules? I'm using whatever python module come from apt-get on ubnutu 13.10? (Pretty much the default install instructions for p2pool if I recall correctly.) Do you know if there is problem with those?

Getblocktemplate itself shouldn't have to go to disk (the mempool is in memory, obviously). Yes the rest of bitcoind does hit disk and maybe this slows down GBT (due to locks), but that shouldn't be a major issue with an SSD. One guess would be maybe with the increased pypy memory usage (not sure why that happens) you have less available RAM for caching so you hit disk (even SSD) more, slowing things down. Perhaps that offsets the CPU gains from pypy.


Ah, that could be. One thing I do is block incoming connections on my bitcoind node, which has the effect of avoiding blockchain downloads (since the standard client only does them on outgoing connections -- to them, incoming to you). Downloading the block chain is really bad with p2pool, especially if you have any ISP bandwidth issues, but probably for other performance reasons, as you point out.


How would this be different from the graph that is currently displayed?

Regarding my hardware it isn't that the system is so new (or fast), it is just that I had some extra 4 GB modules sitting around so I used them. It is actually an nettop type system with a dual-core but otherwise severely underpowered AMD. It may be that I was more CPU limited without pypy compared to a more conventional PC so I saw more improvement.