I think the vast majority of miners that leave p2pool do so because they can't deal with the variance.  It's also why pools like AntPool and f2pool continue to grow.  Less variance... regular payouts... regardless of how bad they are for the network.

I don't think it's that people think it's perfect already... it's that people haven't come up with a better way to do it.  A number of ideas have been thrown around, but none solve the problems inherent in the system.  As much as we all want p2pool to represent a larger percentage of the network hash, if it were to do so, then the miners would experience more and more variance as share difficulty rose.  Nobody's been able to come up with a way to manage that, and nobody's willing to simply translate the pool code from python to C.  Heck, windpath even started a bounty months ago to get some work done.  Nobody took him up on the offer.

That's exactly right.  Unions exist to provide bargaining power to individuals who on their own don't have any, so that the individuals can have their rights represented against another powerful entity.  In the case of BTC, there simply is no powerful entity against which we could unionize.  As somebody a few posts up pointed out, it's not like we can picket outside a mining farm somewhere.  There's no entity controlling the price, so we can't unionize against anyone to demand the price be changed.

Wasn't there a guy running a long-term betting site?  You could bet on BTC price/difficulty at some point in the future... I swear I remember that.

Would be kind of fun... the long-term speculation thread.  Where do you think difficulty and price will be by year end?  By the end of Q1 next year?  Predict the date/time of the halving... all kinds of fun things you can speculate and bet on .

Or how about you just exercise a little bit of self control and don't spend the coins .  Avoids the whole "I printed a paper wallet out and handed to my Auntie who lost it".

We should absolutely not, in any way, shape or form, EVER move to AntPool or f2pool.  Not only are those pools way too big as it is, but they are also poorly written and take shortcuts that are bad for Bitcoin.  In case you don't remember, they caused a fork in BTC earlier this year precisely because of their shoddy software and mining practices.

As to your other points, we've discussed numerous times rewriting p2pool in a language that can handle multiple threads.  Thus far, nobody's stepped up to take on that challenge.  Even so, rewriting the pool code in C or some other language will not handle the underlying problem of crappy cgminer forks not submitting shares which could be solving blocks.

The problem is for ALL Antminers unless you have installed the proper binaries from -ck and kano.  If you are using any other binaries (Bitmain's, some other forks for extranonce, etc) then you do not have the updated code that submits stale shares.  In other words, you are potentially throwing away possible block solutions.

As to your other question regarding luck... yes, I believe it is just poor luck.  We are experiencing normal swings in variance.  As I initially mentioned, S7s are certainly a potential influencing factor since there are no (to my knowledge, -ck/kano can correct me) updated cgminer binaries for it.  However, I don't know how many people currently mining on p2pool are using S7s, so I don't have any reference for how much of an impact it might have .

That everyone updated their gear to S7s, but because they did now p2pool doesn't find any blocks because those same S7s throw away potential solutions?

Sure... I suppose that could be one of the reasons... but it certainly isn't the only one .

It's new gear and the BTC price increase combined.  Lots of S7s coming online.  Some people say that there are warehouses full of gear that sit idly until BTC price increases, at which point the gear is turned on because it is profitable again.  Personally, I think those people are wearing tinfoil hats and constantly looking for black helicopters.

Anyway, who knows what's really happening.  The network hash rate is only estimated by block solve times.  Has that much gear really come online in the past 2016 blocks, or is it a combination of new gear and lucky block solves?  I certainly remember seeing a few posts in this very forum talking about how lucky some pools were - and they hadn't increased their hash rate.  Then again, looking at f2pool's thread, it seems they've grown to 125PH, which is up about 25PH from the last time I looked at their thread.

Once you have successfully created the transaction and it has been relayed to the network, you no longer need to be online.  If you've properly created it, and paid the appropriate fees, eventually your transaction(s) will be included in a block.

There's no such thing as "earning free".  That's an oxymoron.  If you're "earning" something, you are performing some task from which you are then acquiring the coins.  I don't care if it's as mind-numbingly boring as repeatedly clicking on a faucet.  You are still performing a task and investing your time on the execution of that task.

I've got a better definition for you:

Bitcoin is magic internet money!

OK, all joking aside... OP, you might want to actually learn about Bitcoin before trying to define it for others.  That mishmash of words thrown together in your post... yikes.

Now that's a good feeling.  I speak from experience.  Was part of a group that rented out a bunch of hash hoping to hit a block.  We hit two during our rental period.  Hitting the first was sweet.  Hitting that second one was even better .  Of course, I had spent nearly as much on previous attempts as I made back from hitting the two blocks, so my return wasn't as nice as yours would be...

Good luck!  Hope you hit again!

What is the premise of the union?  Who would the union stand up against?  What exactly are you suggesting here?  If the top mining farms refuse to mine coin until the price rises, then eventually the difficulty would simply adjust to match the new, lower network hash rate.  If the top mining farms just refused to sell the coins they mined, I suppose they could eventually make enough of a dent in the supply/demand curves to influence the price of the coins in circulation... but not without going out of business first because they aren't selling the coins they've mined.

Sorry, but the concept of the union here just doesn't fly.

Congrats!  That's a nice return on your investment .

Agreed about the PDU.  If you want to use that one, then definitely swap out the breaker for a 20A.  If you want to keep the same breaker, get a better PDU. 

Glad you've got some 240V circuits available to you... those Bitmain PSUs will work just fine, then.  You're buying a friend an S7?  Need another friend?

A hack... And I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn is like to sell you...

The simple truth was the pool model could not be sustained.  He was trying to run a PPS pool with no fees - for a long time paying a decent bonus to miners on top of expected earnings.  The only way he could have survived would have been to have a decent sized reserve and charged fees to help offset the luck and orphaned blocks.  That's the only way any PPS pool can hope to make it.

Hopefully you've got at least a 208V plug for the Bitmain PSU - it won't even fire up on standard US 110/120V plugs.  I don't know where you're located, but thought I'd point that out for you.  A single EVGA 1300G2 will drive that S7 - but you need to get a couple cable splitters so you can have enough PCI connections.

BAN didn't lose money because of the pool software they ran.  They lost money because they had a business model that could never be sustained.

However, I do agree with your statements about PROP vs PPLNS