Hmm. I find that the pool hash rate on p2pool.info is far more steady and predictable than my own graphing. Is p2pool using a moving average?

Zoom to 1 Day on http://p2pool.info/ and compare to:

http://vtc-us-east.royalminingco.com/p2pool_share_history/diff_history.png

I've heard in chat that

https://github.com/Rav3nPL/p2pool-rav

is where most of the alt coin support ends up. Not sure what the difference is, if any, between his and narken's though.

Nope. I need to clean it up. Maybe I'll make that my project this week. Just got a bit lazy I guess.

Thinking about cleaning up the interface some with faster page loads for most stats and maybe some better graphing options. How much history is worth storing/showing though? Do miners mostly only care about the most recent few hours to be sure their miner is working?

Ahh my apologies then.

Yes look up any solo mining guide. The fact you are mining with an S1 vs any other ASIC miner in the market doesn't matter. The setup is all the same.

How is your local share rate 16K/hash but the pool rate is 135K/hash if you are running p2pool as a solo instance with no connections to other p2pool nodes? I see peers is 0. That's weird.

I'm not exactly sure what DOA means. Is that a share rejected because the underlying coin had a new block arrive and the work had to restart, but the miner didn't update work fast enough? That's my guess. In which case you'd still see some DOAs even solo mining on a private node. The % would depend on the speed of the underlying coin I guess.

p2pool scales your difficulty to the miner to keep the traffic low. The speed to find a share is based on the share chain difficulty. Share chain difficulty is some fraction of underlying coin block difficulty (is it 1/10th?).

Sorry I can't give you more precise answers. I'm new to p2pool myself.

Yes, exactly. If share A's 50% chance goes to the miner, the miner gets full payment for that share on all blocks found.

I think it might be possible to improve on this in a way that would remain backwards compatible with older versions of p2pool. I'll write it up this evening when I get home from work.

If anyone knows offhand, is the sharechain packed in such a way that a specific byte order is required and the structure can't be changed? Or is it stored in more of a json/xml sort of way where a field could be added and older nodes will just ignore the new field since they never access/read it?

If an exchange supports it, they support it. Are you using Cryptsy? I think I've heard people say before it works with them. I don't believe BTC-E works. I have no idea on MtGox.

To see how a pool works just find a recent block they found from the pool's stats. On the newly generated coins, did they all go to a single address (the pool), or do dozens of addresses (the miners). Not many pools pay out directly. P2Pool does and Eligius does. My TRC pool does. It's rare.

Solo mining will take you ages to find a block. Even at 180GH won't it take maybe a year or more to find a block on average?

If you don't want to use third party pools, your best best is to run a local copy of p2pool and mine off of that. Then you will reduce your variance since you are sharing work with all of the other p2pool miners.

Yeah in actuality it doesn't matter as long as they don't use the hash power to attack the coin. And some large pool or miner could always shift more hash power to the coin than the coin has in total right now. But on principal it's best to have hash power spread out.

Variance isn't "risk", just variance in when you get paid. You won't make less income on a smaller pool. You'll just get larger payouts less often, instead of on a big pool where you get tiny payouts very often.

Is bitmain working on any newer miners? (Using smaller size process for more hash per watt, etc.)

Yeah it's silly. Set up a p2pool node or join a public p2pool node. Or join some other smaller pool.

blixnood is the same as the standard Extended, with a few bug fixes, I think. I'm using it here:

http://vtc.royalminingco.com:9171/static/

I just changed to it since the share chart on the graphs page was always blank for me.

p2pool for decentralization, or bitparking for merge mining. (p2pool can also be set up to merge mine)

A valid coin block might not always end up a valid share, if the share gets orphaned or similar. However the coin block will always be accepted and paid out as appropriate by the actual coind process. So no money gets lost. Since you are solo mining, I assume no shares can be orphaned since there are no other nodes. As such I can't explain why you have less shares than valid blocks, but maybe your PPLNS window is small enough the oldest shares have fallen out of the window already. Or some other configuration setting in networks.py maybe isn't the best for your specific coin.

It's an old thread but this answer is wrong, so I want to make sure right info is on here. Yes lots of dust can cause fees when doing transactions and putting it all at your exchange means you can't try to sweep the dust/etc. But the real reason is not all exchanges look at the coinbase for generated (newly minted) coins. They only look at normal transactions. BTC-E is one such exchange. If you deposit newly minted coins directly to BTC-E you'll never get them, because they don't look at the coinbase.

I'm not sure which exchanges this is safe with and which it isn't. But that's why it's dangerous.

If the fees are the same (running a p2pool node yourself means no fee of course, some of the public nodes have fees) then you should make the same long-term. At that point the only difference I can think of would be when p2pool finds a block it is shared via the p2pool network as well as through vertcoind so maybe it gets accepted more quickly, to reduce orphans.

The share chain in p2pool is the PPLNS payment database, in effect. It does it that way so that a network of nodes can work in a trustless way, like how bitcoin/etc function with proof of work adding blocks to the blockchain.

So with 43 shares found so far, since you are just mining by yourself, your entire PPLNS payment database has 43 entries. For each miner (just you), you add those up and that is the amount you are due when a block is found (proportional to other miners also in the sharechain). You can see the amount of payout you'll get if a block is found on the default interface by clicking Payouts. Since you are the only miner, if all of your mining goes to just 1 address, then the Payouts should match the block reward (plus transaction fees) and all going to your address, I believe.

So that's just to determine how much you get paid. When you get paid depends on when you find blocks. For every block found, the pool pays out to everyone on the share chain based on the above. Finding shares on the share chain doesn't pay you, it just sets how much you'll get paid when a block is found.

If you've been paid 60 times, then you've found 60 blocks while having at least 1 share on the share chain.

Hope that helps?