Sure. But look at my graph. smooth and steady at 0.9something for many hours then jumpily climbing... That's not what you would expect to see.

Edit: you would expect to see some climb after we found two blocks so quickly but it still doesn't look correct.

Edit2: Check this monthly chart, especially the circled areas. Looking at this one makes me think it doesn't support the fork hypothesis as much as I had thought though.

Here's the thing that should be concerning to others: Look at the pool rate. That was hanging out at slightly below 1.0PH for a while and then climbs jumpily back up to over 2.0. Now, because that happened *after* I restarted, more than likely that is just something my p2pool instance is seeing but possibly that represents hashing power that wasn't being applied to the longest chain. Unfortunately, the fact we got a block at the same time may have affected things. But again, I'm not even sure if this fork idea is even credible so I'm getting into very infirm territory now. My instance was getting that 1.0PH from somewhere (I know I wasn't generating it )

Anyway, I will keep monitoring the stats and I should be able to see if others also lose shares if it happens to me again. Also, it looks like I can use the outbound traffic as a trigger to let me know I need to pay attention. Of course, I will likely lose shares then as well but I'll give it a go for another block or 3.

If anyone is interested, I'll be using the address in my signature for the mining.

Edit: Another interesting point is that before two of the "Resets" my share was climbing to way more (0.035 and 0.025) than what it typically has been (0.02) which would potentially indicate a fork type scenario.

It shouldn't but see the graph posted above.

bitcoind is left as the default (I believe and is on QOS (which I also have to switch off when I am using the dumb Cisco phone). P2pool is unrestricted and is normally fine for bandwidth. Version is 14.0 which is the latest afaik.

OK, here's some more oddness. Note the difference before and after the restart





Note that the previous drop in payout I had, I had over-restricted my bandwidth with tc.sh (because my upsteam was saturated) so I am wondering if I somehow disconnected from a "false" chain or possibly some kind of DOS (note the high in/out) or... Who knows? It's beyond me.

One thought on the dropping shares. I know that p2pool uses sharechains. Is it possible somehow that there is a fork going on in the background and one of the forks eventually gets orphaned. That could kind-of explain how my expected payout dropped to what the payout was in the block *after* the block had been mined. If I was on the shorter fork...

I am now collecting data about expected payouts for everyone listed in my instance of p2pool and I'll see if this looks like it's affecting anybody else.

Nope. The block was mined at 08:59:53.

The graph shows 0.014 up until I had to kill the p2pool and bitcoind at 09:05 because it was interfering with my Cisco phone. (I blame the Cisco phone for this FWIW).

Payout was around 0.005 (Won't say the exact amount)

Then the graph shows a gap before I started bitcoind and p2pool again when my call was done.

Then the graph continues to show 0.014 for a few minutes then it drops to 0.005, apparently losing most of the shares I had taken the last 24 hours building up.

Someone suggested that maybe the payout address had changed for my earlier issue of losing shares. Besides the fact that I had been running p2pool without restarting from way before it happened so that couldn't have been the case, I also just changed my payout address (to one that I'm OK with sharing) and the payout dropped to 0 (as you would expect) whereas before when it happened, it didn't.

OK, think I'm done with this pool. My payout on the last block according to the graph should have been 0.012 but was actually around 0.005. Then I had to restart the pool and bitcoind and my shares dropped again. Something screwy, chaps.

But my understanding is that even if one fully disconnects from p2pool, the shares you've found should count for 24 hours from their time of creation. Once those shares are in the p2pool net, it shouldn't matter my setup.

Personally, I'm a casual miner and this has only cost me a couple of $ worth of Bitcoin so I'm not going to sweat it too much unless it keeps happening but I'm willing to give back in terms of assisting troubleshooting.

Any other input on this? If shares are being dropped early, it seems like this is either a bug that is causing it or a bug that is being exploited by a malicious actor (?). Either way, not good. I'm willing to help with diagnosing this if anyone who knows what they're doing is interested. I suspect it's easy enough to duplicate.

I'm sure they weren't just knocked up to be dropped in the wall observer thread. It does look like fairly wild speculation but I'd like to read more.

The members of bitcointalk are unanimous in their opinion that you need a new dictionary.

Could you link to the source for these. I think it would be an interesting article.

It does look that way but is definitely not the case. p2pool has been running since Oct16 with the same address...

user 1677  1668 15 Oct16 pts/3    09:28:11 python ./run_p2pool.py -a 1address

What happened was that someone was saturating my upstream by with a bitcoind connection (presumably downloading the blockchain). I ran a tc.sh script which was apparently over-conservative with the bandwidth settings (both for bitcoind and p2pool). I can understand why that would stop me getting new shares but not that precipitous drop.

Maybe. I don't know enough about it. I would imagine that p2pool talking to bitcoind is simple enough that simple load balancing would be enough but I don't know enough to say for sure.

Because Scrooge McDuck diving into a vault-full of gold is a cartoon and not real. People with wealth generally want to do things with it. Buy yachts, build Casinos, hookers and blow, all that. And that requires a currency that others transact in.

If everyone is just storing their wealth with very little in the way of transactions, mining becomes less profitable, miners leave, network security falls away, money leaves Bitcoin and it all becomes worthless. Which is why that won't happen.

This is all rehashed stuff so I'm going to stop here. People can make their minds up in their own time and blocksize will increase in good time.

It is at the moment. Under your fantasy future, not so much.

There's not enough value of Bitcoin for Germany to do that currently. We're playing in the shallow end of the pool and if Bitcoin is going to do anything serious, it's going to have to learn to swim. I have little doubt it will though. And that will mean bigger blocks, one way or another.

Actually it is not. Though I can see why you would think that and it's only about 40% because you're dim.

What do they do when they transfer these bitcoins to their other rich friends, have them transfer them back to them? If you want to use them, you'll have to convert to a real-world currency which can be spent and then you're back in the world of bankers anyway.

So your way is Clandestine $->BTC , $4 transaction fee then clandesting BTC->$

Or just go with the clandestine $ shenanigans anyway.

Ah yes, that well known universal settlement mechanism, gold. You watch too many James Bond movies

(Which also happens to be used by billions of people, from rich to poor, in electronics and jewelery BTW)

Once you get to Bitcoin only being a settlement layer between open source payment layers or whatever, you lose the point of bitcoin which is trustless transactions. Those layers will be few enough that trust layers can be built between them and Bitcoin becomes irrelevant.

Which won't happen because big blocks are coming. And they are coming because that is what is needed.