I like this idea of a VPS with the p2pool and bitcoind nodes on it. Will probably be trying that in the new few days. Anyone else have any tips on doing it?

0-3 shares per day is just fine. The shares are active for a day and a half, so almost every single day you will have one or more shares working. Your daily earnings will fluctuate but only rarely to zero and over relatively few days it will average out.

With a much lower hash rate like 10 GH you could make the argument it will take much longer to average out, although I still maintain at that point the numbers are so small the variance doesn't matter. If you get $0 instead of $1 on one day and get $2 instead of $1 on another day you're not going to go bankrupt over it.

My vote would be sell, get as much value out of them as possible. It is only a matter of time before they are worth nothing, but more than that the amount of output will be negligible for this group (once the new miners arrive), so better to just keep it simple.

I faced a similar decision when I recently sold off my blades. They were (and are) still profitable, with a good margin over power costs, but their output was so small compared to my other gear that it didn't seem worth the trouble to continue managing them.

Eligius is not PPS. It's effectively a softer version of PPLN. Unless the pool is lucky after you join, your shares will just get shelved, perhaps forever. The effect is largely the same as slush, but with slightly lower variance. Conversely with slush if the pool happens to solve a block during (or soon after) your short burst, you will get relatively more.

If you really want consistent payouts from a failover, make it a real PPS.

I use slush as my failover, accepting the variance.

Zero chance that blades are "not profitable."  Even at $0.90/kWh they still slightly profitable to run.

Frowned upon by whom? There is no pool operator to whom you would be paying fees.


Very few pools pay transaction fees, merged mine for the benefit of the miner, and don't charge a fee. It costs money to run a pool, where do you think that money comes from?


You don't know with certainty who is untrustworthy until after they have been discovered to be untrustworthy (or incompetent). As you say the risk of being cheated is there, so the "expected" earnings are lower, even if the adverse event hasn't happened yet.


The higher expected earnings come from the combination of no fees, paying tx fees, merged mining, reduced orphan risk with p2pool, and no risk of cheating by the pool operator.


It doesn't really work that way. 80% of the time your share will be accepted! All this means is that instead of a 4 day average time (if that is the number), you have a 5 day average share time.


These rejects don't mean the same thing. If the pool average is 19% (I didn't realize it was that high) and your reject rate is 19% then you haven't lost any earnings at all.  You are on par with all the other pool members so when it comes time to divide up the blocks you will get your proportional share.

You get more variance. Full stop. P2pool has higher variance than other pools. The compensation is higher expected earnings from no pool fees, payout of transaction fees, and no risk of being cheated by the pool.

The question most of us are asking is whether it makes sense to make it an absolute priority to minimize variance. There is no objective answer, but in real terms the variance for a small miner who expects to pull $2/day at current difficulty is not "large" or "extreme." It is large relative to earnings, but the earnings are tiny, and so is the variance. Even then, it has been explained that you will be getting payouts at that tiny hash rate about 50% of the time. Not too bad.

The main thing you get by focusing intensely on minimizing variance is a nice pretty graph of flat payouts. If that is really important enough to you that you are willing to forgo higher expected earnings, go for it. No one can say objectively that's the wrong thing to do, but we can question it.

BTW, the reject rate doesn't really increase variance though, it just (slightly) reduces the share rate. A share that is rejected is exactly the same as a share that you never found. Other than that the high rejects might be telling you there is something wrong with your setup.

Are you using any nonstandard configuration or settings?

I'm planning to give p2pool another shot on my AntMiners next week. The hardware for the node is on order right now.

How about you drop the obvious bias? "Will" be dry periods, and "probably" some days its shorter?  Seriously?

There WILL be longer dry periods and there WILL be shorter dry periods. That is the nature of variance. But when your total hash rate translates to $2/day the absolute variance will not be much. You will NEVER underperform by more than $2/day.


If you have a "high" reject rate then something is malfunctioning or misconfigured.  A few percent or so rejects is normal and anything up to about 10% probably does not hurt your earnings relative to another pool.


Then you would be wrong. If your expected earnings are $2/day and you have multiple days of getting $0 then you WILL also have days of getting $6 or more. Mathematical certainty.

Over periods of weeks you will very likely earn more than regular pools even with 12 GH. If you want to earn less, go right ahead, but stop spreading biased misinformation.

To follow up I did receive the payout January 1. Sorry for the confusion.

You shouldn't really be paying more than 1% in fees at 0.01, and probably less than that. If you really want to avoid fees you can carefully construct transactions that will get processed for free.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the implied fees given the 0.001 threshold for minted seats but I understand the tradeoffs.

As far as the distributions themselves, the fees aren't that high, the lastest paid 0.0005. But many of the outputs are in the dust range. Probably a good idea to extend the 0.001 minimum to all seats.

https://blockchain.info/tx/24dd3a6ed370882b80d90475d4545118033295d74392512288c3be5a9c582956

There is no reason to assume that the satisfaction of seeing a $2/day reward is greater than the satisfaction of seeing a reward of $5 or $10 every few days. This is hardly solo mining where you are trying to get very lucky and score $20K but most will never get anything (although I'd add that many very small miners might well enjoy that too -- after all lots and lots of people play the lottery and unlike mining the vig on that is atrocious). Every miner with say 12 GH on p2pool will get fairly consistent rewards every week at least, just not every day.

I will say this though, the cost of running a full bitcoin node and p2pool node in terms of bandwidth and effort are significant. If you are only pulling own a few dollars per day it probably isn't worth it.

be careful that you are really using p2pool (p2pool.info). The web site p2pool.org has nothing to do with the actual p2pool and is in fact a centralized pool.

"Wildly extreme" meaning your current estimated $2/day earnings will end up being $0 on a lot of days (and well above $2 on some other days)? How does that even matter to anyone?

Yes, but not overclocked. Separate modular PCIe connectors for each blade. (I think the PSU only ships with 4 but you can get more or retrofit a MB connector)

It is hard for me to imagine anyone with 12 GH needs to use it to generate consistent cash. At that point your expected income is around $2 per day. If that goes to $0 for a few days or longer (balanced out by some higher paying days), who would even notice?

How much are you going to get no matter how you mine?

It will be a little less consistent with p2pool but your expected payout is higher.

BTW, one share every four days does not sound right to me, but I'm not positive.  I did some p2pool tests not too long ago with 70 GH and I was getting consistent shares.

Was there supposed to be a payout at the end of december? I got one in mid december and now another one in mid jan but nothing at the end of december.

KNC Neptune doesn't even exist yet right? I don't think we know whether it will work yet with p2pool, but if you are buying one or considering buying one you can certainly ask KNC to make sure p2pool is well supported.

Donating coins to p2pool is certainly possible and there is a donation address for it, but it shouldn't really be necessary because p2pool already does better than centralized pools by reducing orphans, paying out transaction fees to miners, allowing merged mining and not charging any fees. So hashers who adopt it and become full miners should already increase their earnings.

The bigger issues are: 1) awareness, 2) easy of setup/management, 3) compatibility with some mining setups (some specific ASICs don't work well and very small miners won't get consistent earnings).  If you want to help with decentralization, contribute to working on one of these three items. Anyone who is interested, even without any programming or scripting ability, can help with 1).