For secure data transfer one would set $server and $assetID to plug into "opentxs getmarketoffers" and your open transactions API would go get market offers about the specified asset at the specified server, using your nym's private key to encode your transmissions to the server's public key and the server encoding responses using its private key to your nym's public key.

-MarkM-

http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

-MarkM-

So, 100 search results?

-MarkM-

How many hours ago? It is not many hours yet since I pulled from github earlier today... I am using version 3.3 I think or something like that due to that pull.

-MarkM-

I will be using the "actual internal valuation" rates shown at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html

My scripts that place offers on the markets in my Open Transactions server offer to buy for less than these valuations and offer to sell for more than these valuations, so this "privilege" of converting at the actual valuation rate will get miners a better conversion rate than the offers placed by my trading scripts would get them.

-MarkM-

No. Either the altchains portion of miner awards will be paid in DeVCoins or each miner will get to choose which altcoin to be paid their altchain awards in. I prefer DeVCoins not only because the motivation to open my p2pool setup to the public was a DeVCoin pool bounty but also because DeVCoin addresses are (deliberately) identical to BiTCoin addresses thus DeVCoin awards can be sent to their BiTCoin address. (They simply need to export its private key from their bitcoin wallet and import it into a DeVCoin wallet to access the DeVCoins.)

I can pay the awards on my Open Transactions server too, so they can be conveniently exchanged into any of the other coins/assets.

The pool has its own announcement thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102691.0 and it also has a thread in the altchains section: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102661.0

-MarkM-

Yeah that is going to be the hard part.

Really the plan was never to try to give everyone all the types of coins. Originally, in line with the old version of the DeVCoin pool bounty, the plan was to pay out only in DeVCoins, converting all the other types of coin into DeVCoins for that purpose.

Now that the "must pay out only in devcoins" requirement for the bounty has gone, I have set it up to send out all the bitcoins as bitcoins automatically mainly because that ensures instant payouts for the bitcoin part of it, hopefully "buying time" for figuring out the technical details of how to figure out how many of all the other types of coins that same hashing either did mine or statistically on average would have mined.

Another factor here too is a recent thread in this subforum claiming that merged mining altcoins along with bitcoins is not actually paying pool miners as much as they get at a bitcoins-only pool. So I also had in mind that as long as I pay out at least as much as, and hopefully more than, the pool that chap was claiming to be so profitable, miners should be well pleased.

I would prefer to pay the altcoins reward in DeVCoins, partly because promoting DeVCoin is the original motivation for the pool and partly because DeVCoin addresses are exactly the same as bitcoin addresses, so that I can simply send people DeVCoins to the exact same address their bitcoins get sent to.

I am still trying to figure out the best way to actually compute or tally the amount the altcoin mining adds up to. I had an idea that ZI could look in the bitcoin blockchain to see how much bitcoin a miner earned and compute from that, but it occurs to me now that maybe they could p2pool mine at other pools using the same bitcoin address there and it would not be possible to see from the blockchain how much of their mining was done here thus also applicable to the altchains. So the method of figuring out the altcoin part is still not really finalised.

The fact that I am charging NO COMMISSION on the bitcoins hopefully by itself makes up for a lot; that alone might make just the bitcoin payouts alone come to more than what a miner would make at many other pools.

Another goal of the Massively Merged Mining project is to try to get so much hashing power running that it will be possible for all the chains that went into hiding mode when people started attacking merged mine altchains isntead of using merged mining as intended, to support merged altchains, to come out of hiding. The value reports on those, online at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html show they are doing well enough that adding them to the merged mining mix should turn out to be quite worthwhile, though it will also add to the complexity of calculating mining rewards.

I was actually tempted by the thread about merged mining pools not paying as much as a bitcoin-only pool to make it really simple and just pay per share more than any other pool, as that would eliminate the need to actually figure out how much the the merge actually brings in. But, pay per share is maybe not such a great way to pay, being too easy to cheat, and in any case p2pool doesn't pay that way.

If there is strong resistance/objection to receiving the altchains portion of miner awards as DeVCoins, I guess the other method would be for each miner to pick one altcoin they want their altchain awards to be paid in.

-MarkM-

Oh cool, thanks.

I am not really too thrilled by the idea of putting an additional front end in front of the p2pool though, and my aim is Massively Merged Mining, with a bunch of blockchains already waiting for enough hashing power to be available for them to come out into the public again...

-MarkM-

EDIT: I am seeing now some console output looking like this

2012-08-23 12:51:08.201806 > Worker 1xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @ ##.##.##.## submitted share more than once!

Is this normal? (I see it more than once, presumably once per time they submitted the share, or maybe once per each tiem other than the first time that they submitted the share.) Or is it something they can correct at their end?

-MarkM-

EDIT-again: I also just got a couple of times another error I have never seen before:

2012-08-23 13:05:50.746536 > Unhandled Error
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746640 > Traceback (most recent call last):
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746685 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/protocols/basic.py", line 564, in dataReceived
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746728 >     why = self.lineReceived(line)
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746770 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/http.py", line 1551, in lineReceived
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746812 >     self.allContentReceived()
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746853 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/http.py", line 1619, in allContentReceived
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746895 >     req.requestReceived(command, path, version)
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746952 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/http.py", line 773, in requestReceived
2012-08-23 13:05:50.746993 >     self.process()
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747033 > --- <exception caught here> ---
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747073 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/server.py", line 127, in process
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747114 >     self.render(resrc)
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747154 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/server.py", line 147, in render
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747201 >     body = resrc.render(self)
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747242 >   File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/site-packages/twisted/web/resource.py", line 216, in render
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747282 >     return m(request)
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747322 >   File "/home/bitcoin/p2pool-git/p2pool/web.py", line 190, in render_GET
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747362 >     request.setHeader('Access-Control-Allow-Origin', '*')
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747403 >   File "/home/bitcoin/p2pool-git/p2pool/web.py", line 399, in <lambda>
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747443 >     if dead:
2012-08-23 13:05:50.747482 > exceptions.KeyError: 'last_'

I had done a git pull just a few hours ago, so I am restarting in case this error is due simply to the code having been changed while the pool was running. ( I have seen shell scripts lose their place in the script when the script was changed under them while running so figure maybe python might do that too...)

-MarkM-

Massively Merged Mining: http://p2pool.knotwork.com:10332

Halifax Nova Scotia::Canada::p2pool.knotwork.com:10332::0%::BTC,NMC,DVC,GRP,I0C,IXC,CLC::Massively Merged Mining::MarkM (knotwork)

I have set commission to ZERO so that all the bitcoins mined will go out to the miners automatically.

That means how much each miner contributed will be recorded in the bitcoin blockchain; altcoin awards can then be computed from that data.

-MarkM-

It seems even by the last page of the thread it was still not open sourced, at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=66202.460 you can see user shouting please open source it, but I dont see any affirmative response to that...

-MarkM-

Well then in that case, "not currently but its trivial to do simply by creating an asset contract for PPCoins".

-MarkM-

p2pmining.com is looking like a dead/abandoned site to my browser...

-MarkM-

I have been asked how p2pool knows how to pay third party miners who connect to it, and neither the wiki page nr the github page seems to say how that is done. I took a wild ass guess that its done by using a bitcoin address as username but is that correct?

-MarkM-

Depends... do you have an Open Transactions client installed and working yet?

-MarkM-

Thanks. Added

Use a bitcoin address as username; password is optional. Payouts go to the bitcoin address you used as username. Payouts are automatically created as part of the mined blocks.

to the original post.

-MarkM-

I have been running p2pool successfully merged-mining several blockchains at once for months now.

So, it is time to open it up for others, as the first in a planned bunch of Massively Merged Mining pools.

Point miners at http://p2pool.knotwork.com:10332

THERE IS NO COMMISSION charged, and miner payouts of bitcoin are sent out automatically by p2pool as part of the blocks if mines.

NOTE ALSO that p2pool payouts include transaction fees. So these automatic bitcoin payments DO include your share of any transaction fees the block contains.

In addition, because it is also merged-mining several other chains, additional bonus payouts will be forthcoming, we just don't have software set up yet to do that automatically.

Currently it is only mining BTC, DVC, NMC, GRP, I0C, IXC and CLC, but the objective once enough Massively Merged Mining pools are in operation is to be able to add CDN, GMC, GRF, MBC, NKL, UKB, UNS and maybe even CZB. Plus any others that happen along.

(GeistGeld was dropped from the list due to its excessive resource usage which interfered with the merged mining as a whole.)

See http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for tables of values of CDN, GMC, GRF etc etc etc coins.

There is a thread about this pool in the altchains section too: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=102661.0

(Any questions relating to the altchains aspects of the pool maybe should go in that thread.)

-MarkM-

That is an artifact of using p2pool.

By default, p2pool pays out only in the primary chain (in this case that would be bitcoin), paying out in microtransactions it puts into the blocks it creates.

By setting the commission rate to 100%, I presumably prevent this automatic payout of bitcoins, which in any case does not take into account all the merged chains also being mined at the same time.

Unfortunately p2pool does not let a negative commision rate cause people to be payed out more than they mined themselves on that primary chain, otherwise I could have set a negative commission to let miners be sent extra bitcoins to account for the merged chains. (But would not be able to offer to pay in devcoins instead of bitcoins...)

Since one can qualify for the devcoin-pool bounty without paying out all the owed money in devcoins, I suppose one arrangement that miners might find attractive could be to set the commission to ZERO so they get full no-commission payout in bitcoins for the bitcoin mining, then worry separately about all the merged chains...

-MarkM-

EDIT: Since I am not seeing any responses, I am going with that ZERO COMMISSION model for now to see if I get responses to that. I can always open more ports and add more machines to end up running more different commission-models. Lets see if full payout of bitcoins automatically will attract some miners...

Good points. In the past people momentarily putting something online only to shut it down later once they have received the bounty has been a problem.

Conversion rates is also an interesting consideration, I have been accumulating historic values and putting them online at http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html but I can easily understand how/why someone would prefer to use for example the much much lower devcoin exchange rates found at vircurex if their users demanded bitcoins instead of devcoins.

Arbitrage is supposedly expected to eliminate such large differences in exchange rates, but so far my exchange has no active arbitragers conducting arbitrage against vircurex otherwise presumably all those dirt cheap devcoins on vircurex would have been snapped up by now and moved to my exchange.

-MarkM-

I have been using p2pool to merged mine many chains at once for a long time now, it works fine for me personally however I am not at all sure how or where to find statistics about third party miners so that I can calculate appropriate payoffs for them.

Since the objective is to be able to give them choices about which type of coins they get paid in, I have commission set to 100% to prevent them getting automatic payments in bitcoins.

Looking through the browser interface I see some graphs but don't seem to be able find any clear summaries of how many shares or how much hashing or somesuch that each miner has contributed, nor any way to clear a miner's total on paying them in order to start accumulating a new work-total toward a future payment.

-MarkM-

UPDATE: POOL CLOSED DUE TO LACK OF USE/DEMAND.

The DevCoin pool bounty has been made more general, now allowing a pool that has devcoins as one of its payout options instead of having to use devcoins as its only payout option.

Thus I can open my pool's payout option to actually putting pool shares on a market, where people can buy and sell pool shares; or I can simply offer to pay out in any type of coin or other asset traded on my Open Transactions server.

Currently my pool mines Bitcoins, Devcoins, Groupcoins, Namecoins, Ixcoins, I0coins and Coiledcoins. However the hope of various other altcoins such as Britcoins, Botcoins, bitNicKeLs and so on and so on and so on is that if we can get enough hashing power into Massively Merged Mining pools they too will be able to move back to being public blockchains instead of having to hide in the Open Transactions server from threats such as 51% attacks to which blockchains with low hashing power are vulnerable.

Note that this is alpha stage: I have p2pool running, it has been working for me for months, however few third parties has done much mining on it  it yet so I do not know how its statistics work, how vulnerable it is to miners who cheat and so on.

Since we mine more chains than any other pool, and do not intend to charge any fee/commission, we should be able to pay miners more than any other pool other, perhaps, than the one that resells hashing at a premium on demand for unknown purposes.10332/static/graphs.html

The pool should be reachable as port 10332 at p2pool.knotwork.com (That is, tell your miner program http://p2pool.knotwork.com:10332)

Use a bitcoin address as username; password is optional. Payouts go to the bitcoin address you used as username. Payouts are automatically created as part of the mined blocks.

It looks like the most general measure of contribution currently is on the graphs page at

http://p2pool.knotwork.com:10332/static/graphs.html

The so called "area" value seems to be the product of the hash rate and the amount of time spent hashing.

It does not mention difficulty though so I am still looking through the data directory trying to find something that will be more useful to compute payouts from. EDIT: I have now set commission to ZERO so miners will get ALL the bitcoins they mine, and that means the bitcoin blockchain will serve as a record of miners' contribution to the mining overall. I can thus periodically add up how many bitcoins the pool awarded them as shown on the blockchain and figure out from that how much "altchain bonus" to award them in their choice of altcoin.

I already have archives happening of historical values of various assets, see http://galaxies.mygamesonline.org/digitalisassets.html for some tables derived from those archives showing asset values expressed in a few selected assets. (I should expand the selection, there isn't really much reason other than not having to gotten around to it not to provide such tables expressed in terms of each of the assets.) So conversion rates between asset types are not a problem, the problem currently is how to figure out how many of each type of coin either was mined or should on average statistically have been mined so that those values can be converted into each user's preferred payout asset.

-MarkM-