Lets see.. Right now, we can expect a found block (whole p2pool network finds a bitcoin block) every 5 hours.
To not have any significant impact on payout, you should constantly find several shares in every round. So if you set the difficulty so that you find around 5 shares in 5 hours, you wont have much additional variance by the amount of shares you find..
Which would mean: 5 shares every 5 hours, or one share every 60 mins, which calculates to:

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/old_calculator.php

<1Gh/s --> default difficulty
1Gh/s --> difficulty 1000
2Gh/s --> difficulty 2000
etc

Which would give you a share every 71 mins.
Which would give you 4 to 5 shares every block.

Easy rule of thumb, one thousand for every gigahash.
For us who actually understand the system with variance and all, this seems reasonable?

You could of course set it smaller or to default. But the actual variance you then see wouldnt go down a lot, since then the variance of the block-finding is a lot larger than the variance by share-finding.
And, also, it all is better comparable and nicer with a constant 1000 or 2000 difficulty instead of the default variable and ever changing difficulty ;-)

Ente

Thank you a ton, DnT!
I now have one incoming connection, that surely is you, thank you!
So at least my setup isnt faulty, I guess..

Aah, now I get it, with the local difficulty! I will now set it to /1000+1 here.

I invite everyone who isnt afraid of a bit more variance to make his difficulty a bit higher, receive more per share, and reduce the difficulty for the fearsome! ;-)

Ente

Its been several days now with open port and 24h with new version running, I still have zero incoming connections (and the 10 outbound). What do?
The (24h dynamic) IP is 93.218.231.154, if someone would be so nice to try to connect?


Why am I still trying this?
My orphans and stales seem to be too high:


The p2pool node is dedicated, debian, has a ping latency of around 45ms.
The new graphs seem to indicate all workers behave fine.

Should I simply accept these stales as "normal"?

Ente

Schönes Projekt, hat definitiv Massenpotential! :-)

Tja.. Sicherheit.. Wenn es weiter einsteiger-freundlich bleiben soll, sehe ich da auf die Schnelle keine Lösung. Sobald die User mit Clients, Blockchains, Keys hantieren müssten, kann man die ganze Idee auch sein lassen, und auf bitcoin.org/download verweisen..

Maximal vielleicht eine "export" funktion, die die Keys als plaintext auf den lokalen Rechner eportiert? Immerhin kann man dann die Bitcoins retten, falls die Seite/Projekt/Facebook nicht mehr erreichbar ist? Hilft aber nicht gegen Diebstahl (von einem Betreiber oder von Angreifern) und macht ganz neue (lokale) Sicherheitsprobleme..

Also: Aufklärung! Lass technisch alles so, wie es ist (ich hab die App noch nicht gesehen, kein FB), hinterlege genug Infos per Pop-Up wenn man auf "technische Details und Sicherheit" oder so klickt?

Viel Erfolg!

Ente

Thank you for the clarifications and thoughts, guys! Nice!

Ente

I still dont get it, sorry folks..
So I have to tell every miner which difficulty it targets. Like for example 1000 instead of the 700ish now.
That difficulty is simply the miner's name.
How do I set a miner's name of "Miner" and a difficulty of "1000"? What does that "x" and "16" mean in that example above?

Thanks,

Ente

0.10.3 running, yeah! :-)


Both work, but just where "graphs" is written on, "graphs" you see.. :-P
The old graphs still are visible too, which I like.

I updated with the "seamless" method suggested a few pages ago:
-git update
-start new instance of p2pool
-let it load everything
-close old instance of p2pool

worked nicely.
on linux, that is, obviously.. :-P


When loading, it loads at the moment around 25000 shares. When running, it says something about 17000 shares.. What is up with that?

Now I will make my personal difficulty higher, I will try 1000 for starters. You guys remember that plan, right? For lowering the "official" difficulty of p2pool, so smaller miners are more attracted to p2pool..

Ente

Verification -> CPU is the bottleneck
Download -> HDD is the bottleneck

So, which one of the two then? :-P

Defragmenting the local (large) blockchain doesnt help, in my tests.
I cant believe its a HDD throughput problem.. Sure, many thousand blocks, but its just a few gigs data?

So I guess "verification/CPU" is the problem. My CPU was at 100% while loading the chain, too..
But then: The point in cryptographic tools (like hashing the block to verify) is that the verify is quick, the reverse (brute-force) painfully slow?

Ente

Oh yeah, great! :-)

It really was a pain to wait one, two days for the whole chain..

Out of historical curiosity: What made it took so long? Downloading the blocks from other peers, or verifying the blocks when they got there?
Also, at the beginning of the downloading they came in by the thousands, at the end you can watch the blocks come in one after another per second?

Ente

I personally don't believe it is that complicated and sinister, but I like your thinking!

Ente

Sweet! :-)
Can't wait to get home!


Uh, so what happens when a few, or when most nodes switch? I can't imagine the sharechain would split, you would have made instructions about that. So it doesnt matter when we switch, as long as it is in the next days? Sooner, to get all the nice new features! :-)

Aah, individual graphs, awesome!
I am considering leaving work earlier today just to check it out!

Ente

Makes sense!
The IP will auto-reconnect every 24h, will that make that node "unreliable"? Or does it just have to run a long time without restart/reboot to be "reliable"? I.E. does every installation have an ID or something? Or does it change with running instance, or with IP?

Hmm, I guess only forrestv can answer this?

Ente

hmm, okay then..
I just rechecked, and could telnet into 9333 from outside. P2pool saw that connection (and timed out), so I just have to wait for connections to come in (still 10+0, after one hour)

Thanks for the info!

Ente

Ah, nice!
I have tcp 9333 forwarded, closed p2pool and restarted. Anything else I forgot? I am still at 10+0..
Is (only) 9333 right?
I dont need to announce this or anything, do I?
Or is it just normal that it takes that long for nodes to connect?

Ente

p2pool easily - No downtime (its peer-2-peer, right?), no fees, all transaction costs are shared as well. Pretty large now, so variance gets smaller and smaller. There were donations spread out too, which is currently under redesign and will come back.

All these make p2pool the best paying pool in the long term. Sure, others might offer bounties or boni in the first weeks, but in the long run p2pool pays more.
And you get the nice feeling helping Bitcoin to re-decentralize again! :-)

(Setup your own p2pool node for full control or join one of the several public p2pool nodes)

Ente

Edit:
Use that one Bitcoin to test the multi-donation when it comes back! ;-)

I have more orphans than I like..
Orphans point to bad connection? I forwarded port 9333, but I still only have 10 peers, 0 incoming..
Other hints? Can I change the '10' limit?
The internet connection isnt that fast, I fear..

Ente

That's great news, thank you!

Ente

I just wrote this in the p2pool thread, it fits right in here too:


Hope that helps,

Ente

Small info:
I experimented with merged mining, and did so with GeistGeld. This alt-chain has a blockrate of only a few seconds (15, or 7 if it halved already). It did work, I solved some GeistGeld blocks. The reported hashrate by miners and p2pool was right as well. But after solving 10 shareblocks, I had 5 orphans and one dead. Must be because p2pool creates new work for the miners every few seconds, when GeistGeld reports a new block.
I switched Geistgeld merged mining off again, now I have around 10% orphans.

Of course this is an extrema, since GeistGeld is the fastest chain by far.

Ente

Aaaah! I would never have guessed that! Thank you!

Ente