Haha. No worries.

The fake pseudo shares are controlled by +DIFF. The actual difficulty of shares you are trying to submit for credit (not just graphs/hashrate purposes) is /DIFF. Agreed that he's possibly too small for it to matter. (I have no idea what p2pool's share difficulty or bitcoin's difficulty are these days.) /DIFF is usually used by huge miners to reduce their shares/block by voluntarily targeting a very high difficulty target. Small miners running their own node don't need to worry about it, the vardiff logic won't push their target too high.

It's only a problem if you are a small fish in a large public node. In raw p2pool a year ago (no idea if the code has changed), the share-chain diff target for miners on a node was based on the node's hash rate (not the miner). Thus small miners on a public node also being used by other much larger miners would have diff targets higher than the share-chain minimum difficulty. By using /DIFF you can override that. If you want to make sure you always mine at the minimum possible share-chain difficulty, you could just use /1 since it'll make the share-chain difficulty the floor.

Relevant code includes my attempt to fold this into official tree:

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/pull/174

And iongchun's branch where he provides some config options to give you more manual control over how it works, but with the same intent/basic result. However, this only effects psuedo-shares.

https://github.com/iongchun/p2pool/tree/auto-worker-diff

Here is me trying to get iongchun's stuff merged in as well:

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/pull/187

TLDR: Public node operators should use both 174 and 187 to help small miners be served appropriate difficulty target automatically.

I don't know if you are running your own node or what, and this is my first time in ~8 months looking in the forum, but have you tried /DIFF if you want more frequent (but smaller value) shares? It won't do anything if you are already submitting at the network minimum diff level. But if you are on a public p2pool node that isn't running my old patches, your share difficulty might be higher than it needs to be. (I have no idea if any of my work ever made it into p2pool itself or not.)

Some info:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg6556442#msg6556442

I'd suggest running your own p2pool node is the best choice, secondly running off a public node running my patches unless someone else or forrest did something better which made them obsolete, or thirdly manually adjusting /DIFF.

I've not been active in the bitcoin community for a long time now, just randomly popped in the thread to see what's up, and I see this is still a topic of conversation. It's important to note (as you did) it is simply perception/variance, and people don't actually lose any income. If you can only find 1 share every 2 blocks, that share will pay enough that the income per block is still the correct average. This was a common point of confusion and misinformation a year ago. I suspect it will persist forever.

How do the Antminer S3s perform on p2pool?

I've not been around the forums or active with bitcoin for a few months, so I think I'm going to wind my projects down. The cost for the various pools/nodes are running about $170/mo, and for a hobby I've kinda set aside, that's a bit much.

The biggest project was the TRC pool but given the .0001 value these days, it's probably not worth keeping open either. It's been a fun 14 months, but for now I'm going to put everything into hibernation. Good luck to all.

Well for the patches I've written, I have to fork the repo into my own name on github, make a branch, push the changes to the branch, and then submit the pull request to the maintainer. I'm pretty sure what I provided will work as expected though.

I've not done it this way often, but I think you'd use:

git pull https://github.com/roy7/p2pool vardiffbyaddress

or

git pull https://github.com/iongchun/p2pool auto-worker-diff

Depending on which you wanted to pull in.

This is possibly misleading for people new to p2pool, so I'll clarify. There is a dust theashold in the settings for coins in the config file, which the basic idea is "don't have miners work on share targets that will result in a payment below this amount". So what happens is your share target will be set, at a minimum, to pay you the dust threshold. If this target is higher than you'd normally get for your speed, then this means you'll find shares less often but the shares you find are worth more. To illustrate with totally made up numbers:

Vardiff wants to set your miner to submit shares with difficulty 1000. This results in a payment of 5 coins.
However, the dust threshold for this coin is set to 20 coins.
Therefore, your target difficulty will be set to 4000. You'll find shares 1/4 as often, but the shares will pay 20 coins.

This way a tiny miner never get payments that are "too small". They will only receive payments at the dust threshold amount, but they will get paid less often. It does not effect long term average earnings.

For someone running their own node I guess it doesn't matter much, but I made this simple patch for public nodes so that small miners won't have their difficulty target pushed higher by large miners on the same public node. The pull request to the normal repo is:

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/pull/174

A much more advanced patch is by iongchun (also a pull request to the main repo) in handling pseudo share difficulties:

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/pull/187

iongchun folded in his own fix for alt coins serving DIFF 0 work, so I removed my prior mini fix. People running native p2pool repo from forrest for alt coins should at least pull in iongchun's patch for the DIFF 0 fix.

+DIFF only affects the pseudo shares you send in for logging/graphing purposes, it has no effect on your earnings. Using /DIFF changes the minimum shares you'll submit, in case vardiff is setting your target difficulty above the network minimum. If you are already at the network minimum, then /DIFF lower than that again has no effect. On some alt coins, /DIFF can be useful if you don't care about dust and want more (but smaller) shares. On Bitcoin, /DIFF is mostly only useful to very large miners who want to reduce the # of shares they find (finding bigger shared instead) to help keep network difficulty down for everyone else.

I deposited some vertcoin 2 weeks ago and my balance still shows 0.

Correct. This is just a historical info site that forrestv took over from whoever else used to maintain it. There's no public node running there.

UNO is the primary coin, not the merged coin. I run UNO and BTC nodes.

I know there's almost no chance the miner would see this, but just in case, VjCmX1z1KHn1rewGC6t6vjnzRj8CYLZe9S on my us-west node is not configured for scrypt-n and all their hash power is going to waste.

How can we use them when deposits never show up? I like Coinex's interface and it's my preferred exchange for alt coins. I'm happy to keep using them in spite of the prior theft. But without knowing any better, I sent in some coins the other day and instant of the instant "pending" and quick deposit as soon as it confirmed, it's just silence.

Is the site officially "offline" for new business though or just temporarily having issues? Not realizing otherwise, I deposited some vertcoin the other day to sell, but the deposit never showed up. If you aren't actually still in active operation I don't know why it isn't clearly stated somewhere to not send in new deposits/etc.

You should contact them on their support thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=176938.0

p2pool.org is just a public node like many people run, it's not an official site/service/etc of the P2Pool project (which this thread is for).

I sense we're drifting way off topic again.

My pleasure. We use those stats on a modified version of p2pool-node-status, you can see it here:

http://us-east.royalminingco.com:9332/static/