I am not sure if this is a known bug, but I noticed that the wallet functionality of blockchain.info isn't dealing well with an orphaned block.  Here is my circumstance:

• I have an address in my wallet that I use to mine with p2pool
• When p2pool finds a block, my address receives some BTC via the generation transaction
• One of the p2pool blocks was orphaned
• The generation transaction for that orphaned block appears in my wallet transaction list and is marked as an unconfirmed transaction
• The BTC from that generation transaction appears in my balance even though it's not really available to me and never will be available to me

Everything seems ok except for the last point.  There appears to be no way for me to tell the wallet to only include confirmed transactions in the reported balance and so my balance is going to be "wrong" forever.

Is there a workaround for this?

You can upgrade anytime you want between now and April 1.  Assuming this is going to work just like the last protocol change a few weeks ago, the p2pool software will automatically switch from the old way to the new way at midnight (U.S. Eastern Time probably) on April 1.  And there is probably a 1 hour grace period like there was last time to account for the fact that everyone's clocks are not exactly synchronized.
 

This version also includes the suggested message at startup about donations.  If you explicitly enabled donating, it thanks you.  If you have forced donations off, it asks you to change your mind and donate.  If you don't have the donation command line argument at all, it explains that it is donating 0.5% by default and explains how to change that with the command line parameter.

Thank you, forrestv.

It will take a while.  P2Pool nodes prefer to connect to nodes that have been up for a long time, so if your node is just recently added to the network, you won't get chosen very often.

Yay, Internet.

What if p2pool prompted the user the first time it ran:

Do you want to support ongoing development of the p2pool software by donating 0.5% of your earnings to the developer?  [y/n]

It could store the answer in the data directory just like it does the vip password, etc.  And of course if someone actually included a donation parameter on the command line, it would not prompt.  It seems like this would address the fact that the default donation is "hidden".

First, please don't release software under Creative Commons.  Creative Commons wasn't designed for software (it's designed for content:  photos, books, music, etc).  See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Can_I_apply_a_Creative_Commons_license_to_software.3F

Second, IANAL, but if you use a GPL's library like JSONRPC-PHP and if you choose to distribute your application to others then your code must also be GPL (or public domain, since that means you are relinquishing your copyright altogether).   If this isn't something you want to be forced to do, then don't use the JSONRPC-PHP library (JSON RPC is not that complex... you could probably just whip up a couple wrapper functions yourself if you had the desire).  Apache v2, on the other hand, is a pretty restriction-less license.  In fact, it may be one of the licenses you might want to concider instead of using Creative Commons as it basically says "do whatever you want, just don't blame me, and don't remove my copyright notices, etc").

I don't know what to tell you to try next.  The error is coming from bitcoin when p2pool tries to ask it for the list of transactions to include in a block.  You need to figure out how to get bitcoind or bitcoin-qt happy again.  Only thing I can think of is to blow everything form bitcoin away (except your wallet.dat, if it contains any addresses you care about), and start clean with a freshly downloaded blockchain and a fresh install of the bitcoin binaries.

The error messages you see are coming from bitcoin, not from p2pool.  Go make sure you actually have the latest version of bitcoin.  Based on what others have reported, it seems that the bitcoin installer often does not actually update old versions.  Maybe try the .zip file instead, or try uninstalling the old version first.

What does the p2pool log say for the time that it was broken?  Hard to diagnose without knowing that.  The log is kept in the data/bitcoin/log file under the folder where p2pool is installed, so you can go back and look at it after the fact if you didn't delete it when you reinstalled p2pool.

I agree.  Lots of pools have optional donations that default to being enabled at some amount (often 0.5%, even).  I don't see this as different. 

Sometimes I hear it argued that with those other pools it's more obvious because you can see it in a web page.  I think that is B.S.  The optional donation for p2pool is not any less visible than any other setting.  The mechanism for telling other pools what your settings are is a web page.  The mechanism for telling p2pool what your settings are is the command line.  The default donation command line option is clearly documented right there next to the command line option to choose your payment address, and to the options to specify your bitcoind hostname, username, and password.

If you want to use p2pool, the reality is that you should be comfortable with the command line.  If you want to argue that that is not ideal, fine.  A GUI wrapper to p2pool might be a good thing to create.  But I think it is disingenuous to single out the donation command line option as somehow more obscure than any of the other command line options.

Bummer about both.  I don't use the graphs so hadn't noticed that pygame wasn't compatible.  But if it doesn't offer any significant CPU efficiency gain, it's probably irrelevant.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool#Frequently_Asked_Questions

Q: Why does my miner say it has found a lot of shares but p2pool say I have only found a few?!

A: The real P2Pool difficulty is hundreds of times higher than on normal pools, but p2pool essentially lies to your miner and tells it to work on relatively easy shares so that it submits shares every few seconds instead of every few hours. P2Pool then ignores any submitted shares that don't match the real share difficulty. By doing this, P2Pool can more accurately report your local hash rate and you can see if you are having problems with too many stale shares quickly

Cocaine cartels think of what they do as just a business as well...

This made me curious, so I am running p2pool with pypy as we speak.  It seems to be working fine, but I'll watch it for a day or two and see if there are any abnormalities.

I agree.  XP is lame.

He's asking about orphaned shares and not orphaned blocks, but the concept is similar.  An orphaned share happens when two people find shares at about the same time both building on the same previous share.  These two new shares are now in a competition.  One of them will get extended by the next person to find a share and the other won't.  The one that is not extended is an orphaned share and won't result in any payout.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool#Frequently_Asked_Questions

Q: Why am I not getting very many shares?!
A: The P2Pool difficulty is hundreds of times higher than on normal pools. It can take time to get a share. P2Pool displays an estimate of how long you have to wait in the console output.


The graphs don't work on windows because python-rrdtool doesn't work on windows.  Switch to linux or wait for the graphs to be changed to not depend on rrdtool.

It's called Windows To Go (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_To_Go) and will probably not be a feature of the consumer versions (i.e. it will probably be for the Enterprise version only)

There's not an "easy" way.  You'll have to dig into the p2pool source and start enhancing it to do whatever you want it to do.  This is, in effect, what they guy behind p2pmining.com has done.  He has a customized version of the p2pool software that does enough additional accounting that he can pay his miners based on the difficulty 1 shares they submit.