Is it possible?  Yes.  Is it likely?  No.

To make money from running a pool (not including any advertisement or non-mining revenue like donations it might generate), you need to charge fees.  You then need to get a whole lot of miners hashing on your pool.

Here's an example.  Let's say you create a pool and charge 1% fees to your miners.  Let's also assume you manage to get 1PH/s of hashing power pointed to your pool.  Right now, that would expect to earn you about 0.009915BTC per day (or ~$6.50).

Let's use a real-world example.  Kano's pool charges miners 0.9% fee.  His pool has about 28PH/s of hashing power currently.  Expectations are that he'd make 0.24993BTC per day (roughly ~ $164.50).

Sure, it looks like easy money, right?  Good luck!  I've been running my pool for nearly a year and average about 150TH.  That's a drop in the ocean, especially considering about half of that is my own mining hardware.  I have a 0.5% fee.  Therefore, my current expected earnings per day from the pool alone is 0.0007435BTC a day (or roughly ~ $0.49).  That's less than $15 a month, which doesn't even come close to covering the costs of running the pool.

That statement is patently false.

Average transaction fees are about 0.0001BTC per kb.  Average transactions are about 225 bytes, so an average transaction should run about 0.0000225BTC (or about $0.01).  Obviously, you can add as much of a fee as you want.  When writing this post, my Bitcoin Core recommends paying a fee of 0.0007BTC per kb if I want to expect a confirmation in the next block.  Yes, that value is always changing, and is not a guarantee.  Even if I were to use that value, I'm only paying about $0.10 per transaction.  Nowhere near the claim of $6 per transaction.

I'm not sure how you want to calculate the CO2 emissions of a transaction.  Creating a transaction costs exceedingly little computational power.  Including that transaction in block template is also minimal work.  The real work comes in finding the hash that satisfies the network difficulty to add that new block to the chain.

To estimate that is to guess.  You'd have to guess at the total power consumption of all bitcoin mining equipment.  Then you'd have to use an average power cost, and an average number of transactions per block to take a stab at how much power one transaction in a block would cost.

That's the hard part .  I ran my own p2pool nodes for about 2 years prior to opening up my own mining pool.  I also spent the time learning how to best optimize my nodes.  Unfortunately, not everyone will bother to take the time to do so.  As you've noted, it's hard enough just getting node operators to all use the same/latest version of the code.  It's one of the benefits of p2pool, and also one of its pitfalls.  Because everyone can set their nodes up how they like, not everyone will set them up the same.  Some might run a node on an old Windows box sitting around their house.  Others might setup dedicated hardware in a data center.  Some might tune their coin daemon.  Others might not.  Some might merge mine as many coins as they can.  Others might not merge mine at all.

Due to the individual choices people can make about how to setup and run their nodes, you're never going to reach a consensus on a "best" configuration that everyone can follow.

You're spot on with your reasoning.  Knowing how to set things up properly plays a large role in the composition of the blocks you create.

In a more typical pool model (like mine, kano's, etc) a single source provides the workload for all miners.  You as the miner don't have to know anything other than how to configure your hardware to point to the pool.  Details of block size, block composition, etc are all managed by the pool software and the pool operator.  With p2pool, when you are running your own node, you must also learn how the blocks are created.  Ideally, you should understand the code - how it creates blocks, how often it changes the block composition, etc.  For example, what happens in the p2pool code when a block is found on the network?  How does it invalidate the transactions on which miners are currently hashing?  Does it produce an empty shell and push that to miners?  Does it fully validate the new block?  What are the optimal block size settings that will be most efficient for your p2pool node?  What kinds of transactions should be in any blocks it creates?

These are just some of the things a pool operator needs to know, regardless of whether or not that operator runs a typical pool like myself, or a p2pool node.  The reality is some pool operators don't have the foggiest.  This applies to both models - I'm not singling out p2pool here.

In a nutshell, on a pool like mine or kano's, the burden of this knowledge is ours to bear.  We tune our pools as best we can to produce full blocks with lots of transactions and fees.  For example, kano ensures that all of his own pool's transactions are included in the work given to his miners.  Why?  Because it allows him to confirm the pool's miner payout transactions, which might otherwise not be picked up by other pools.

Looks like it's time to add a few more panels to the solar array

Isn't it amazing how perspectives shift?  Remember when having 10TH/s was considered "professional level" mining?  That was a farm of 50 overclocked S1s.  Now a single S9 does more .

Good luck, Phil!

It's not available yet.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been keeping an eye out for the announcement .  Rumors had it launching in September, but obviously they were incorrect.  I really hope they are competitive against the S9 in terms of efficiency.  Some pretty good speculation about them has been written based on the codebase.

Well... unfortunately, there's no new gear available, so you'd have to look for folks selling things off.  I'm not a fan of Bitmain's products, but at the moment they have the most efficient miner around.  If you can find them, expect to shell out some coin.  People will likely inflate prices because there simply isn't anything else to buy.  To get a single piece of kit for your specified hashing range, the S9 is your only choice.

I see the similarities... you were comparing GB to BCN and GB pool to BC pool.

I certainly do not believe the math they present - especially the completely unrealistic promised returns - and the MLM crap is just another way to scam people.  Build your network and reap the rewards (as long as you aren't on the bottom of the pyramid).

What they both do is something that very few other cloud mining operations have done: provide "proof" of mining.  Now, I put the word proof in quotes because there's really no way to associate the cloud hashing contracts with the hardware mining on their pools.  For example, I can't buy my "cloud hardware" and see the miner UI that shows my username, password and pool to which the hardware is connected.  I just have to place my trust in the provider to actually have the hardware they claim they do to support any contract I buy.  That's not going to happen.  I own my hardware, thank you very much.

I run my own pool (have for about a year now), and ran my own p2pool nodes for a couple years prior.  On my pool, you, the miner, control the payouts.  Sure, I set minimum values that can be withdrawn (0.001BTC) but that's to prevent you losing too much of your payout to fees, and also to prevent you from trying to withdraw dust.  There's nothing I have to do manually to ensure your bitcoins get sent to you.  You set the controls, and decide whether you want to withdraw your coins manually, or set a threshold where they will be sent to you automatically.

I don't trust these guys because they claim copyright to work that is clearly not their own.  I don't trust them because they have payout issues.  The payouts are controlled completely by them and are supposedly run on a daily basis... which has not worked and they've manually executed some payment transactions claiming all is good.  I don't trust the BS claims of ROI.  There's obviously a lot of hardware mining on the pool... that much is certain.

That was an interesting thread to read, tmfp.  I love how it's always the newbie accounts coming the defense of whoever is being called out.... Hi, I know my username is now "SomeMadeUpBS" but I'm really "TheGuyYouMean".  Unfortunately, I lost my password / my cat died / no longer have access to that email account and had to create this new account...

Whatever.

The thing is, these guys really do have a ton of hardware pointed to their pool - at last check it's over 30PH.  Either they own the hardware themselves (probably purchased from the cloud mining scams they ran) or have somehow convinced around 2% of the world's hardware to point their way.

You mention similarities to BitClub... but I'm not seeing them.  Help me see what you see

Obviously these guys are using ckpool underneath the covers.  Unfortunately, they've completely removed the footer references to the authors of the software, and have instead put their own copyright claims to it.  That's just a dick move.

Congrats!  Nice low share count, too.  Since you were pretty much the only miner (assuming you're "pooladmin") not a bad payout for you .

Who knew those Neptunes had it in them to produce a share that high?

I'm curious... your block generation went to two addresses:

1JpKmtspBJQVXK67DJP64eBJcAPhDvJ9Er (which you identify in your OP as the pool's generation address)
1BKAxnPetrDyXN1RbcrJkm4xCbehTiqR5d ()

The second address got about 1%.

SMF... hmmm.... I wonder if there are any forums that use it...

Sorry I haven't replied back sooner... just been buried at work and haven't had the opportunity to take a look into setting up a forum yet.

Agreed.  Changes to formatting, colors, etc certainly do not constitute changing your code in any significant or meaningful way.  Taking your name off the copyright footers is just a dick move by the pool operators.

Hey OP, how about you do the right thing and give credit where it is due?  Also, how about you actually explain your issues with making payment, instead of just giving some BS excuse and promises they will be resolved in a few days?

Blatantly claiming credit for code you didn't write and not properly paying out your miners.  Not exactly a good way to introduce yourselves to the community.

I've not looked into running a forum on the site.  Not sure how much value it would add, or how much work it would take to integrate one since I've never run one.  I'll take a look at some options, though.  Thanks for the idea

Block 434048 has matured and coins are available for withdrawal.  If you have auto-payouts setup, your payments have been sent and confirmed.

Good luck, Phil!  Here's to a daily double

That S7 hit with authority: 1.7T share...

Daily double would be freaking fantastic!  You hit again today, I'll send you a little 1.5BTC present

Congrats dsppage on finding the block!

Block 434048 contained 1668 transactions with a total value of 10,684.64971416BTC.  Miners earned 12.86591264BTC reward, which includes 0.36591264BTC in fees.  Another nice green block with a CDF of 0.3384.

Use the orb as a lottery ticket... not a bad idea.  I have 5 Antminer U2 sticks that I have playing the lottery .

The S3 expects to earn 0.000428BTC per day currently.  Since kano's pool expects to find about 3 blocks a day, that means you'd expect to earn about 0.00014267BTC per block.  Not dust, but not very much over the threshold, either (anything 10,000 or under is dust).