mdude77 has setup donation addresses that a number of us contribute to. The proceeds from those coins are exchanged to BTC and donated back to p2pool miners. Hunterbunter has setup a very cool front end for donating. A bunch of people have used it to donate to p2pool miners. You forgot Rav3n's fork of p2pool. It contains virtually every coin. Links: mdude77 donation addresses: DVC: 1f56VqR9ajX3K42qSaDezvKXFmruSDg1B IXC: xaNQ54gxowcwHyxqGtFM4vwCfS84V6fmKF NMC: N1XhWNmvGhFL145zmQGQv7Vug6mThNh1iQ I0C: jMDtRnMAk2WxaoAw8HUceMaxPPqAuZ8AEN FSC: Fjhv8Sk8iC7AF76CTJbKo1zkHLUbTTTBs2 Hunterbunter donation thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=646427.0Rav3n's fork: https://github.com/Rav3nPL/p2pool-rav.git |
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He does if he wants people to switch on donations again. Anyway, if we can't ensure that future mining hardware is usable with p2pool - it will die - simple as that. The hash rate drop since his spectacular fail of a "statement/moan/bribery attempt" shows which way p2pool is going, it will only get worse as everyone gradually switches off their S1's.......
Copy/Paste of my last received email from Bitmain:
"Hi,
Thanks for the info.
Please kindly provide us compared version of screenshot showing that the different speed when you use the p2pool and other pools. we need to provide more details to engineers to investigate it.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Best Regards
BITMAIN"
As my node is no longer online (stripped down) I am unable to provide these - can anyone chime in with these?
Peace.
Hit up Kano... he's done a crapload of work on cgminer trying to get it to play nice with S2 and p2pool. Unfortunately I'm in Tokyo again, and don't get back until the end of the week, so I can't send screens of the S2 on p2pool. |
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Hello, I am considering using p2pool, but have a few questions I was hoping someone could respond to.
1. Is it possible to use p2pool without a full bitcoin node?
2. Is it possible to use p2pool with mergemining and if so where/how can I do it.
3.What coins are merged mine on p2pool currently
Thanks
1. You can point your miners to somebody else's p2pool node. If you want to run your own node, then you need to be running a full bitcoin node. 2. Yes. There's a good thread describing how to do it here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62842.03. NMC, DVC, IXC, I0C, FSC, HUC |
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I installed Bitcoin Core on my laptop and copied ~22GB of bitcoin data from my PC (blocks folder, chainstate folder, wallet.dat ...)
I launched Bitcoin more than 6 hours ago and its still hasn't started. Task Manager shows that its using %60+ CPU and 500-600 MB RAM resources.
Is that normal?
It's doing a full rescan. Depending on the specs of that laptop, it might be a while yet. |
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ill be adding more to it. ill be able to run the s1 and s3 off that PSU
That would handle the load just fine. That PSU has 8 PCI-e connectors, yeah? You'll need 6 of them to drive the S1 and S3 together  |
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There on there way  AntMiner S1 Bitcoin Miner 180GH - 200 GH Qty: 1 AU $259.00 Silverstone 1200W (1300WPeak) 80+Gold ATX12V/EPS ST1200-G Evolution Power Supply Qty: 1 AU $163.50 I read the first line and thought, "Wow! Bitmain has released the S3, I better check out the site to get some details!" Then I saw you are talking about an S1... lol. By the way, that's an awful lot of power to drive a single S1. Half of that is plenty powerful enough to handle an overclocked S1. |
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As with your other articles, this one is well written and executed. Great job. Kind of off topic, but related to your articles. You have one entitled "Reach for the ear Defenders!" that starts out talking about how noisy miners are, but then spends the rest of the article discussing theoretically what would happen if the hash rate stayed consistent for 52 difficulty changes. While I enjoyed the article, I'm a bit confused with the title and first sentence |
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You aren't going to mine at pool X and earn 0.00032BTC then jump to pool Y and earn 0.01BTC with the same hash rate.
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@ramchik - first, welcome to the addictive world of mining and to BTC in general. Congratulations on finding your very first share.
Now, on to the bad news. As has been stated, the days of CPU/GPU mining of BTC are long since over. You are effectively paying more for the mining process than you can ever possibly hope to recover by mining. There are plenty of ASIC options that are extremely cheap and will offer you orders of magnitude more hashing power than your GT8500. For example, you can pick up an Antminer U2 for around $10 USD. You just plug that into a USB port on your computer and go. It will give you approximately 2GH/s, which is 1000 times faster than your GPU.
If you do wish to only use your computer for mining, and not purchase any additional hardware, I would suggest looking into some of the alternative coins. Those you can mine and hopefully trade for BTC through an exchange.
Best of luck.
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Hey guys, i have a technical question concerning p2pool.
While shares can quite easily be DOA because of the ~60times faster sharechain, found bitcoin blocks shouldn´t become dead/orphaned that quickly, as they are then broadcast on to the Bitcoin network.
So what happens, when my found share would be a Bitcoin block but the p2pool node considers it a "late" share? Is it still passed on to the Bitcoin network?
Yes, but it won't show up in the p2pool block list, either.... and you won't get the .5% bonus for it, just the "normal" amount earned. ... also why no-submit-stale is bad to use with p2pool. You're correct about the no-submit-stale settings. With p2pool you want to submit everything. You're incorrect about not getting the 0.5%, though. There's nothing in the generate_transaction code reliant upon whether or not the share is either stale or DOA. It always divides up the rewards into 199/200 for miners on the share chain and 1/200 for the miner that found the block. Hope that helps. |
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If you are talking about the rewards, give it at least 6 months, both of them will have more or less the same payout for the last 6 months. Most normal pools have fees which can result in p2pool having more payout. They also have email notifications which alerts the user if the hashrate falls below X.
Is there any reward for the P2Pool owner ? Some of them run it for free for others. Some people set up their own nodes and mine it on their own node as it have less latency and traffic. So, unless a P2Pool owner has his own mining equipment, he's not gonna profit from this ...right ? Because, like a normal pool owner, he cant charge ...is not it ? Unless you impose a fee and people are still interested to join it which is unlikely. Is it possible at all to impose a fee on mining payout for a P2Pool ? Yes, if you run this command, screen -d -m -S btcp2pool ~/p2pool/run_p2pool.py (username) (Bitcoind password) It will automatically donate a small amount of the miner's revenue to you. That is incorrect. If you run your p2pool node as you describe, your node will donate 1% of the earnings to the author of p2pool. If you want to charge a fee for miners to use your node, you need to add the -f argument. Example: This will charge people who mine on your node 1% as well as donate 1% to the author of p2pool. You can set the percentage to whatever you want (up to 100). If you want to change how much you donate to the author, you can do that with the --give-author command. You can most certainly merge-mine on p2pool. As of now, you can mine NMC, DVC, IXC, I0C, FSC, HUC along with BTC on a p2pool node. Your node's hashing power is combined and used to try and solve blocks for each of those coins. The difference between schemes like those at GHash, Eligius, BTCGuild is that those pools pay the miners, whereas p2pool pays the node. If you want to pay your miners proceeds from merged-mined coins, you'll have to do so manually as they will not be automatically paid. There is a very nice comparison thread showing earnings from p2pool, Eligius and BTCGuild here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=416933.0One of the nice features of p2pool is the ability to donate - and surprisingly, people do indeed donate. That is one advantage over mining the other pools. |
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@mdude77 - another 100k FSC sent to your donation address. Tx ID: 8b3d8cb44cb98aa45c0e5bbf6b4f75338bc00fda377d8842b960ee3f43f4c13c
@forrestv - glad to see you posting to the thread again. You stated that you've spent a lot of time thinking on how to implement some of your ideas, and may have had a breakthrough in how to reduce variance to the smaller miners. I would love to see you spending time here bouncing those ideas off of people. I think you'll find there are a number of people regularly posting in this thread that would be more than willing to help you solve some of the problems you're facing. I hope that you will use the community as a sounding board and remain active with us.
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4) if the s-2 fails you are at zero hash
5) if 1 s-3 fails you are at 1th hash. This. The above is why I only purchased s-1's I purchased 16 had 1 fail had it replaced a bit too slowly and I was helped by minersource.net for the rma not by sushi-review i purchased it from sushi-review. I have 3 s-1's mining right now sold the other 13. I never put any 1th machines in house. But I am getting 1 s-3 and 1 rk-box to compare them.. My guess is I will end up with more s-3's then rk-boxes but I will wait and see. 16 S1s... throw a couple in each room of your house this past winter and you had some nice space heaters... mining BTC and saving on your heating bill as well |
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4) if the s-2 fails you are at zero hash
5) if 1 s-3 fails you are at 1th hash. This. |
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Well... S2 = 1TH/s at 1100 watts give or take. 2xS3 = 1TH/s at 800 watts give or take. S2 with coupon is $1450 S3 is ?? S2 has integrated PSU S3 requires separate PSU with 4xPCIe connectors (which you already have according to your post) S2 ships 26 June S3 ships ?? Me? I'd wait for the newer hardware... |
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This is a great conversation guys, and one that needs to be had.
I have built and managed large development teams in the past for specialized projects, and I have to say that none of them came close to the complexity and challenges offered by what we need in a p2pool dev team.
For p2pool to get to the next level I think we need an active lead dev or chief scientist to lead; and 3 technical achievements, the first 2 are easy:
1. Hardware compatibility and a responsive available individual for both HW and mining SW folks to work with.
2. A great looking front end that provides what miners want that is unified across nodes. p2pool already has the ability to be the most transparent pool in existence, lets get that data out there for miners to mull over and do it in a way that looks so good out of the box that node operators are not inclined to re-invent the front end with each install. When a miner checks out a node it should be familiar and they should know what they are looking at. I'm happy to build this using open source tools and have a solid start already on my node. Combining Bootstrap, PHP, and an SQL DB we could build an open source, cross-platform, front end that both looks great and is data rich.
Which leads me to our 3rd, and biggest challenge:
[b]3. Vertical scalability that reduces variance for all miners.[/b]
This is where the real challenges lie.
For p2pool to support large mining operations, and still be able to attract medium, small, and micro miners we need completely new share difficulty and payout structures.
The first step here has nothing to do with code, some completely new concepts need to be developed and generally accepted by p2pool miners. Once we have those concepts down, and can demonstrate them to be technically possible, we can seek out devs with the chops to pull it off.
This may seem like no big deal, but I assure you it is. Here is my first crack at it:
[b]Payouts[/b]
While miners meeting a certain threshold could still be paid directly from the generation TX, smaller miners under the payout threshold when a block is found, lets say [btc]0.01 to start, would be able to see their p2pool earnings down to the Satoshi in real time, but would not receive a payout until reaching the threshold.
To accomplish this I propose a decentralized, trust-less escrow system.
A p2pool software controlled secure wallet where all payouts from each block that did not meet the payout threshold would be stored, and then paid out to miners when they reach the threshold.
Miners who reach the minimum payout during a round are paid directly from the generation tx, while payments for all miners under the threshold are are sent to and stored in the wallet, and payouts are made from the wallet when the threshold is reached.
The caveat is that this needs to be handled entirely by p2pool in a decentralized and trust less way with no single "admin" overseeing them. How to handle the keys securely without anyone but the p2pool code knowing them is the challenge, maybe the guys from the dark wallet or Armory teams would have some technically viable suggestions.
[b]Difficulty[/b]
An automated "variable and weighted" share difficulty would need to be assigned to miners based on hash rate. Every major pool in existence does it, we just need a method of doing it across the p2pool block chain in a way that is not easily manipulated. Perhaps the MIT Bitcoin club would be interested in tackling such a challenge?
[b]End game:[/b] Protect the network, encourage miners to participate actively in both Bitcoin and p2pools decentralized nature.
Even without active development p2pool is a strong "brand" in the Bitcoin space, most miners are aware of it, and its challenges. Overcoming its biggest challenges along with a decent marketing push (by us collectively) spreading the word could easily push p2pool to the top and keep Bitcoin strong and trust less for the future.
Just my 0.02 bits.
I think the biggest obstacle with your proposal is: A p2pool software controlled secure wallet where all payouts from each block that did not meet the payout threshold would be stored, and then paid out to miners when they reach the threshold. I'm not sure the concept of a secured wallet that needs to maintain thresholds for users and process payouts dependent upon when a user crosses that threshold can be translated into a decentralized model. Centralized pools like GHash/BTCGuild/Eligius/Slush all have their own payout models and can pull this off because they are indeed centralized. We need a way to reduce the variance that will inevitably occur as more miners are added to the p2pool network. As I previously wrote, this is what I believe is holding p2pool back from becoming a more mainstream option. Think of it like this: if every single BTC miner decided to join the p2pool network that means ~100PH/s and share difficulty would become 1/20th of the current BTC block difficulty. Current BTC difficulty: 13462580114.5253
Divide that by 20: 673129005.726265 A share difficulty of 673.1M is not a feasible model. Assuming I have 1TH/s: Difficulty * 2**32 / hashrate / 86400 = number of days to find a share
673129005.726265 * 2**32 / 1000000000000 / 86400 = 33.46142437017714 Over a month's hashing at 1TH/s to expect to find a single share, assuming the difficulty remained constant, which it wouldn't, because BTC difficulty is going to adjust every 2016 blocks. You're looking at needing 12TH/s or more to expect to get a share onto the chain within the 3 day payout window. Nobody besides the "big guys" currently has that kind of hashing power. The closest you're going to get will come in August when Spondoolies-Tech starts shipping their 6TH/s SP30s. If you happened to get in on RoadStress' group buy around Easter time, 2 of those would have cost you about $9000 USD. Of course, the example I gave is completely contrived. Nobody expects and/or believes that p2pool will become the sole BTC mining operation in existence. Maybe we do nothing at all, and just accept the fact that unless you increase your own hashing power, you will experience more and more variance as your hash rate becomes a smaller and smaller portion of the p2pool network's rate. As I wrote in my first reply on this topic, the current entry level hardware to p2pool is pretty much an Antminer S1. Soon, that entry level hardware will be 500GH/s (the Antminer S3). Perhaps this is just the natural progression of things and changing the underlying way p2pool works to accommodate the smaller hash rates is futile. Even if we go with a multi-tiered approach, as I suggested, how do we define those tiers? What becomes the "cutoff" value to move from tier 1 to tier 2 to tier n? How many of these tiers would be "enough" to effectively reduce the variance? |
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The two biggest problems I see with p2pool are as follows:
1) Vertical scalability
2) Hardware support
By definition, p2pool does a fantastic job at scaling horizontally. Just take a look at the latest guide and you can have p2pool, complete with merged-mining up and running with two commands. Even if you don't follow that guide, and build everything from scratch, the amount of work to get a node up and running is pretty minimal. Unfortunately, the failure is in the pool's ability to scale vertically. As most pools grow in size, the variance the miners experience levels out. Look at pools like GHash and you'll see that your payouts are pretty spot-on accurate with the "expected" payout calculators. With p2pool, exactly the opposite happens. The more the pool grows, the more variance the individual miner will experience. Let's face it, as it stands now, you need to have at least 100GH/s to have an expectation of finding 1 share a day. All of those people we are trying to convince to join the p2pool experience need to realize that the entry fee at this point is pretty much an Antminer S1.
The reason it fails to miserably at scaling vertically is due to the design of the pool's payout mechanism. Essentially, as a miner on p2pool you are solving a block (we call it finding a share). The structure of this block chain is very similar to the BTC block chain. The primary difference is generation time. The share chain is expected to find a "block" every 30 seconds, whereas Bitcoin is designed to find a block every 10 minutes. Just like what happens to BTC difficulty every 2016 blocks, the same happens to the share chain (except more rapidly) to keep the average "block" time at that 30 second mark. If we suddenly increase the hashing power to 1PH/s, 10PH/s, etc, the difficulty to find a share will increase correspondingly. Then, the entry price of mining on p2pool will no longer be 100GH/s, it will be 1TH/s, 10TH/s, etc.
One possible way to address this problem is to introduce a concept of tiered nodes. Just like the share chain is now kept to store miners/payouts/etc, we would introduce sub-chains. Each of these sub-chains would have lower difficulty. As miners submit shares, those shares would be evaluated against difficulty for that share chain, the one above it, and so on, right up to the BTC block chain. Implementation would be tricky because miners would have to be restricted and directed properly to an appropriate share chain. You wouldn't want a miner with 10TH/s hitting the share chain whose difficulty was set to handle miners with an average of 100GH/s. Either the pool would have to dynamically adjust and put the miner on the appropriate chain based upon the miner's calculated hash rate, or it would have to outright reject the miner because of the calculated hash rate. This is just one possible solution, and I need to think on it further to discover pros and cons of the approach, and if it would be feasible to introduce. Comments and suggestions are most certainly welcomed.
As for hardware support, we are seeing a number of the newer manufacturers not building drivers into their hardware for p2pool mining. A great example is the Antminer S2. Point your S2 at a p2pool node and you'll be lucky to see 850-900GH/s. Point that same S2 to Eligius, BTCGuild, GHash.io and you'll get the advertised 1TH/s. Kano (one of the developers of cgminer) has been trying to build out a replacement cgminer for the S2... thus far unsuccessfully. The last post from him was that when he pointed the latest version of his firmware to p2pool it exploded with all kinds of errors, both on the miner and on the p2pool node. We need a developer who can work closely with ckolivas/kano/Luke-jr to ensure that p2pool is compatible with the new hardware releases. As a hardware manufacturer, what is going to be my best bet? Developing firmware for a pool that makes up a tiny portion of the network, or ensuring my hardware works well with pools that represent 80% of the network's total hash rate? Those aren't trick questions... it's easy. As a manufacturer, you work with the 80.
OK... that's my 2 satoshi.
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Hello everyone.
Recommend me some cool bitcoin hardware to mine
How much are you looking to spend? |
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First of all, thank you for this thread! My first post to this forum!
I want to learn about paper wallets and keys more, What is the best place to learn more about this process?
Whats the best way to learn by doing, without risking a lot of bitcoin?
Paper (and wood like the OP is offering) wallets are just another way to store BTC. There are any number of services out there that will allow you to create, or will create for you, such a wallet. You can print them from your home printer, burn them into wood, engrave them into metal, or just write them down by hand on a piece of paper. Any wallet, be it paper, wood, metal, or electronic consists of two important parts: a public key and a private key. The public key is what you give to other people so they can send you coins. The private key is what allows you to access those coins and send them to others. Think of this kind of like your bank deposit box. Your bank will give you a key to open the box and deposit things. Only they have the key to open it from the other side and retrieve the deposits. If you go to blockchain.info, they've got a pretty decent tutorial. Check it out here: https://blockchain.info/wallet/paper-tutorial |
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The SP30s are supposed to be quieter than the SP10s... how much quieter I'm not sure.
You can't trust marketing, no use speculating until they are in the wild. They said SP10 wasn't too bad either ... It's supposed to be quieter because of the bigger form factor allowing for larger fans. I read in the Spondoolies-Tech thread that they measured it at 68db as opposed to the SP10 coming in at 74 (might have been 72)... at any rate, the measured difference was not very large. Of course, with the larger fans, perhaps there won't be the high-pitched whining quality to the sound. At any rate, if I do purchase one, it's going to have to be hosted. I don't have the power to drive one of these at home... well, I *could* run heavy duty extension cords all over, but the little lady would have my head if I tried that one |
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