Honestly until you mentioned it this evening I'd never even seen this sort of feature mentioned before. I did some searching and here's a post talking about exactly what you said, and it is why they use ghash.io:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=406194.msg4409010#msg4409010

The only issue is ghash.io is holding your coins, and they pay out on precise %s. In p2pool's world, you can't split a share like that so the best you can do is approximate it by allocating work with the mining address assigned out with the %s you want to pay out to. Which won't be as exact.

Edit: You know, it'd be possible to code this up where it's all passed in the username. Does a pool username have a max length in programs like cgminer/bfgminer? Since + and / are already used, one could add support in p2pool for a syntax like ADDR1*.5,ADDR2*.3,ADDR3*.2 as your username to split the payment address in work servers to your miner(s) randomly between those addresses at those %s.

Ah ok. In addition to the struggle to think of things that would entice miners to use my nodes for some appropriate fee %, there's also the feeling anything I do I should just commit to the project and make open source as well. Which, of course, then ends up giving me nothing but a sense of accomplishment but no way to pay for my servers.

Were you the one I chatted with about it on #p2pool? It's been long enough I don't recall who it was now.

I chatted with someone on #p2pool once who did a probabilistic payout model for a group of people who mined with him on his private node. That's more random for the people you are paying than if you collect the coins yourself and then pay them evenly. But of course that does open yourself up to wallet theft, etc. I'm a big fan of paying directly to people and not holding coins whenever possible.

So for example, if you had 10 investors who own 10% each of the pool, then you wouldn't use the incoming miner addresses at all. You'd customize the payout code so each of those addresses had a 10% chance of being chosen as the one going into the p2pool share chain (like the way fees work). The problem is if investors get upset than investor A is being paid more than B, since it's random. A more advanced approach could record the payments actually paid out to the investors on the blockchain to their group buy addresses, and mine to the investor address who has received the least payments. Sort of a payment round robin approach, so one investor can't get too far ahead of another due to randomness. (Adjusted as needed of course if miners don't have equal ownership stakes.)

So someone in your example might find that useful. But it'd be easy enough to code without needing it as an official function for everyone.

Edit: I'm always trying to think of ways to run p2pool public nodes profitably. The proxy pool project is pretty cool and I ported that to vertcoin but didn't make a payment backend system yet. However your comment about farms/group buys wanting a feature to break out their payments in arbitrary ways more complex than just 'everything to this address' could be a value added feature worth implementing.

p2pool already works well with large miners. Cointerra's products work wonderfully with it. It isn't a technical challenge, it's a marketing/advertising/perception one. Why don't the bulk of CT users mine with p2pool instead of some other pool? That's the question. If I owned a huge farm, using p2pool would be an automatic choice.

I'm saying let the sharechain grow as large as needed to hold the full PPLNS window size, like all normal PPLNS pools do.

I'm not sure if I'm doing the math right here, but -ln(1.0 - .95) = about 3. So 95% of all blocks should be found within 3 * difficulty shares worth of work. That is, only 5% of shares should result in no payment at all. organofcorti please chime in if I did this wrong.

But if the share chain is capped at 3 days worth of shares regardless of the difficulty of finding a block and regardless of the amount of work stored in the chain, instead of always at N = 3 * difficulty, then the size of N for the PPLNS payment window shrinks and the % of shares resulting in no payment goes up. This doesn't happen in traditional PPLNS pools, N remains fixed and the % from above remains fixed.

Caveat: I don't know the inner workings of how p2pool juggles the share chain size and spread variables to come up with it's minimum share target difficulties.

I think you didn't understand my point. If the window (N) for PPLNS is large enough then shares should get paid on every block as well. That doesn't make it the proportional. The problem right now is the share window is shorter than the time to find a block, so some shares don't get any payments at all, in spite of SPREAD being set to 3. (That is, the payment window is 3 * difficulty.) As I understand it, the share chain length overrides the spread, so the payment window will fluctuate based on however much work fits in the share chain instead of the most recent N.

BTW it's kinda a bummer the max share chain is only 3 days. The SPREAD is 3 blocks worth of work, so that would normally mean any share someone finds should get one or more payouts. Is the reason we have a max share chain length at all to prevent abuse? I'd think the share chain should expand as much as needed automatically to store SPREAD worth of payouts...

The only things I can think of are the patches I've already put in pull requests for, and for larger miners to take higher share diff targets so the share diff network wide would go lower. I wrote some thoughts on that a while back but got no replies. Maybe the revamp forrestv is working on will solve it.

You've never noticed that people using public p2pool nodes are far more likely to complain that they are getting no payouts, than that the payouts they are getting a smaller than they expected? You can argue single GPU miners shouldn't care much because their earnings are so small in absolute terms. However, they seem to care quite a bit and check their stats often. They are also very noisy when they aren't finding a share often enough to get paid on every block. Usually that degrades into saying p2pool rips off small miners since they don't understand how it'll average out long-term. Larger miners who also have variance but get paid on every block don't raise as much fuss.

The main ones are

https://github.com/Rav3nPL/p2pool-rav
https://github.com/CartmanSPC/p2pool

I think

If that is their real IP and not a proxy, it wouldn't be that hard for the ISP to see which customer was assigned that IP address at the times Eligus was accessed. Should law enforcement get involved that is. And on top of that, isn't cryptocurrency illegal in Russian? Some extra charges that could be filed.

I probably ran into the soft ulimit. Looking at my other node:


Node has 22 incoming and 10 outgoing peer connections. There are 7 active miners. However there are 142 active file descriptors on the mining port number (vertcoin is 9171).

It appears to be all of the hostnames of the miners who have ever connected to the pool since the last restart. Are those file descriptors never closed?

Looking more closely at the actual list, there are many duplicates to the same actual miners, just on a variety of ports. Such as this guy (his IP address removed):


29 file handles all for one miner.

Thank you for this!

Just got hit with the number of files issue myself.


I google'd how to increase the #, and checked this:


But honestly that should be well more than enough? It is possible the file handles to the coin daemon aren't being closed properly? So each RPC call it slowly counts up towards the maximum?

Didn't know to try this before restarting p2pool, but


only 672 files in use after it was restarted, out of the 165K maximum.

I was referring only to NMC. NMC coins aren't mined directly to the payment addresses I believe. For my BTC I mine to my normal Electrum wallet.

I've not used the pool long. And before that only briefly when not mining alt coins. No biggy, and it's only a single Antminer. I'll just change it back when I get home tonight. I pay directly to an exchange since I don't run a namecoin wallet.

How often are NMC payments made? I'm not sure I've ever gotten one.

Edit: I passed on the situation via support ticket and IRC. I figure that's more useful than just complaining here.

My NMC payout address is also set to N4CVwS13ELKimdJNEChgMJnLZiA7L6MU5F atm.

Edit: I'm not sure when/how/if NMC payments are made, but I've never actually received one that I know of. Figured it was just a rare thing and didn't worry about it.

You might try one of Jude's threads or PM him. This is the general discussion thread for the p2pool software itself. p2pool.org is just a public node someone runs, not an official site of the p2pool developers.