?? This has been one of the luckier weeks and months in a while:
Pool Luck(?) (7 days, 30 days, 90 days): 139.2%96.8%106.6%

i'd love to see what deepbit is paying out these days! It's all luck, but p2pool has had some good variance for a while.

now that the firmware is open-sourced, i've been wondering if someone will tinker with it to enable custom nonce ranges. i won't have time for a while to even look at it...

it's sad because BFL stated it would work with p2pool
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=90658.msg998190#msg998190

They just open sourced the firmware. Implementing a custom nonce range might be what is needed to get BFL SCs to work with p2pool.
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/913-bitforce-sc-communication-protocol-draft-revision-2-a-8.html#post31853

something bugging me about https://cloudhashing.com/

The page lists the contracts in terms of G/Hash (as in 10 G/Hash). The unit G/Hash doesn't make any sense.

I think they mean to write, and should correct it to say, 10 GHash/s (as in 10 gigahash per second)

I agree with k9, the only real choice is between ASICminer at $400/GH/s and BFL at $50/GH/s. The gamble everyone has to make is whether the difficulty will go up by a factor of 8 by the time you receive your product. According to the futures market (FWIW, but it's the only place you can put your money where you mouth is https://icbit.se/WebTrade/Account/Futures.aspx), it looks like that will occur after September.

If you think you can get a BFL delivery before September, then order BFL. Otherwise, ASICminer's USB thingys seem to be more profitable.

Historically, it appears the contrarian approach was generally correct:

First, BFL announces their project and everyone falls in love with it. Avalon announces later and people were told, "Don't waste your time with avalon. BFL will outproduce them and beat them to market: it will never be worth it." At that point, in hindsight, Avalon was actually the better deal.

As the months tacked on, the advice became, "BFL is such a scam, or at least so incompetent, that batch 2/3 Avalons are the only good investment. Even now when Avalons cost significantly more than batch 1. Everyone with BFL orders should get their refund before the ship sinks." Now in hindsight, it appears that BFL is shipping a couple hundred 5 GH/s miners per week based on http://bfl.ptz.ro/, so if the trend continues and accelerates, it's possible Avalon 3s will sink (Avalon 2s may be ok). Those that kept their BFL preorders, or even made new orders, look likely to come out ahead over avalon batch 3.

Now prices have changed for everyone, BTC/$ has changed, and community based Avalon and BFL chip projects are showing up. At this point, the only question is "Who can ship to me first? If both will arrive at the same time, who has less power?" Since there is no Avalon batch 4 (yet), and the the avalon 3rd party systems are in the pre-prototype stage, the only thing left to do is the calculation of whether the USB ASIC miners (blades for high $/GH) are a better deal than placing a bet on a BFL order.

There was also the, "The sky is falling! 100 TH/s added to the network in August! Don't buy any ASIC miner!" based on the amount of money Avalon's chip sales account raised. That has yet to be seen whether to be true, but based on past warnings - the opposite may be more likely.

The title of this thread always makes me chuckle. An "official" "clone" sounds like an oxymoron. Aren't all clones unofficial by their very nature? Someone should start the official clone of the official clone of the Avalon.

I originally didn't have a problem with BFL creating an external charitable organization, but you're right - all celebrity charities are run by an external board. BFL too may need to set this up, otherwise it could be seen as a way of money laundering or tax evasion.

I, personally, like the idea of the 1000BTC donation going to an organization which then doles out smaller donations to the community. But that organization's choices should be independent of the group funding it, and maybe it will be.

I received a dev demo unit. See cgminer output below

 cgminer version 3.1.0 - Started: [2013-05-15 12:40:54]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 (5s):lots (avg):42Th/s | A:432847907  R:0  HW:234  U:14341/m  WU:234/m
 ST: 2  SS: 0  NB: 2966  LW: 99936  GF: 3140  RF: 0
 Connected to mining.eligius.st diff 1 with stratum as user 1QrjskeiWEGa32...
 Block: 00d342d6aaa3c258...  Diff:15.6M  Started: [13:09:26]  Best share: 93G


Has a few hardware errors, will be worked out in a firmware upgrade.

Will sell demo unit for 1500000BTC
1Q2rRMA2Af2TPtwjy89MoxyuVxPbfTwx1C

Or wait 40 minutes...
the ubuntu ppa binaries have been uploaded

BFL's Pravda announced that it's the exact same design ASIC in the exact same board, it just has less defective engines. "Different chips" just means ones that they have found to work better than normal. They're just binning like GPUs do, find ones that work better than typical and sell them for more.

As long as you can dissipate the extra heat, there shouldn't be a problem - but BFL has had difficulty with that as of late.

p2pool shares and other pools shares are not the same, p2pool will have 10-30% stale shares and still be healthy without hurting your payouts.

It's been stated many times in this thread, but to be clear: the 15% rejects you are seeing are not wasted work and can solve a block. It's also possible that it does not reduce your payout.

p2pool works differently than any other pool. Rather than look at your DOA/STALE/ORPHAN rates, you have to compare "Efficiency" rates (on your console output and web interface). If you have 20% p2pool stales, you may have 100% efficiency - which is the number that counts.

So again, when comparing pools, don't look at p2pool stale rate, look at p2pool "Efficiency" (because p2pool stales are not the same as any other pool stales).

I got a pi up and running as a bitcoind node just to try it out once, and it was working with the old leveldb and only 256 MB memory.

I bootstrapped the blockchain:

-loadblock=<file>

from
http://eu2.bitcoincharts.com/blockchain/

and set
  -checkblocks=<n>       How many blocks to check at startup (default: 288, 0 = all)
  -checklevel=<n>        How thorough the block verification is (0-4, default: 3)

to smaller numbers (don't remember what, specifically)

You were not right, in fact you were very wrong. You need to understand why you're not getting anywhere and people have lost patience with you:

Order of events
1) We had a run of long blocks one month ago around the same time the stratum protocol was implemented in p2pool.
2) You said, "it's impossible to be this unlucky, it must be stratum since that was the most recent change. FIX STRATUM"
3) stratum has absolutely nothing to do with the rate of finding blocks per work. If stratum was 99% broken (so only 1% of the work actually gets accounted for), the rate of finding blocks per work would not have been affected at all - so you were ignored by everyone that knows how mining works since your data did not back up your claim. Also, it was shown that the rate of bad luck was likely to happen when we were at low p2pool network hash rates.
4) Suddenly, without "fixing anything" we had a run of luck close to 180% for a week or two, wiping out the bad luck from (1) above.
5) ASICs came online, no cgminer or p2pool dev had an avalon, but there were reports of p2pool not being able to keep up with avalons
6) actual, real reports with data came out showing that something isn't 100% right with ASICs and p2pool (they work, but need some tweaking) - but still no p2pool dev had one to fix it. We still don't know exactly what it is, but it has something to do with what avalon expects to see and what p2pool is serving. Aseras donated Avalon time to cgminer to finally get cgminer support for avalons.
7) BFL donated an ASIC to forrestv to make sure BFL SCs work with p2pool
8 ) you show up again, "see I was right - you should have listened to me although I had no data and no logical argument backing up my claim"

So in the end, you were wrong - but keep trying until you found someone with a real bug and then claimed credit for it, even though their bug had nothing to do with your evidence or what you are claiming originally.


Demanding fixes without actually knowing what you are asking to fix is childish and naive. Developers don't know what to fix if an oracle shows up saying "fix it" - they need data, which you have never given. It's like saying, "My internet connection is slow. Microsoft, fix Windows!" Then later someone finds a problem with a printer driver and you say, "See, I told you Windows was broken and you all ignored me!" No one in the world will fix it and repeatedly demanding it will get you nowhere. That's why you feel like this lone crusader martyr, you don't know how to help and are frustrated that no one will do what you demand.

We've been begging you to give us data and bug reports for months, but you just lurk around to yell "fix it." That's why people are losing patience with you and is the behaviour of a troll.

You also need to check the file
p2pool/bitcoin/networks.py

Nearly all of the variables there are p2pool specific. my comments are in {}, I know some of them but not all of them.

SHARE_PERIOD=30, # seconds {difficulty is adjusted such that p2pool shares are found this often}

CHAIN_LENGTH=24*60*60//30, # shares {how many shares does the p2pool client keep}

REAL_CHAIN_LENGTH=24*60*60//30, # shares {how big is the N in PPLNS}

TARGET_LOOKBEHIND=200, # shares {not sure}
SPREAD=15, # blocks {don't know}

{I believe these are used to identify p2pool shares in the p2p network}
        IDENTIFIER='a41b2356a1b7d35e'.decode('hex'),
        PREFIX='5623b62178d2b8a3'.decode('hex'),
 
P2P_PORT=9323, {port other p2pool clients will connect to you on}

{bitcoin specific for min/max difficulty in units of target, google "bitcoin difficulty" for more info}
MIN_TARGET=0,
MAX_TARGET=2**256//2**32 - 1,

PERSIST=True, {tells p2pool to remember shares, connections, between sessions I believe}

WORKER_PORT=9322, {port miners connect to your p2pool node}

{the following is a list of IPs where you can download a sharechain and find lists of other clients the first time}
BOOTSTRAP_ADDRS='seed1.p2pool.terracoin.org seed2.p2pool.terracoin.org forre.st vps.forre.st 93.97.192.93 66.90.73.83 67.83.108.0 219.84.64.174 24.167.17.248 109.74.195.142 83.211.86.49 94.23.34.145 168.7.116.243 94.174.40.189:9344 89.79.79.195 portals94.ns01.us'.split(' '),

ANNOUNCE_CHANNEL='#p2pool-alt', {if you find a block, you announce it on IRC}

VERSION_CHECK=lambda v: True, {not 100% sure, either tells p2pool to check other p2pool nodes versions or your bitcoind version}

Linux is designed to be a stable server. remote secure login (ssh) is easy, when using a stable distro the server never goes down. compiling the newest miner, bitcoind, pool software is much easier on linux than trying to set up mingw on windows.

Even if you had to pay for linux, it would probably be preferred for setting up a serious mining operation

very important, in case you didn't know or someone else reads it:

don't do:
In p2pool / p2pool / bitcoin / networks.py

Change ADDRESS_VERSION=8, to ADDRESS_VERSION=25

that changes the address from a novacoin address to a bitbar address. you can leave the bitcoin addresses alone

In p2pool, dead shares are not wasted work. They can still solve blocks and payout. 20% DOA is expected with p2pool (because at the speed at which it generates shares for the sharechain) and does not negatively affect earnings. On your p2pool console output (or the p2pool stats web page) you should see a number that says "Efficiency." That's the number that counts and should be ~100%.

If you want to really push your efficiency higher, see:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0

The +
The +xxx difficulty is just the difficulty of the shares which p2pool users to report statistics. You can set that to whatever you want, but it should be low enough to get good statistics on the health of your system.

the /xxx difficulty is the difficulty of the shares that you get credit for payouts with, and is limited to 10x the default difficulty.

The default payout difficulty will be such that your private p2pool "network" will find one share every 10 seconds.