If you send the coins to the payment address and it doesn't register with them until after the 15 minutes, they get alerted to the late payment.

If the coin's new exchange rate still covers the purchase, it will go through. If not, you get credited, and they will email you for the remainder.

I had a decent several-email conversation with Anthony and Stephen at bitpay.com, and they explained this process at a time I was concerned my delayed transaction would be lost.

They were pretty damned responsive to my emails too, I didn't have to wait long at all, at 10p EDT and later, on Saturday night, to get multiple replies to my questions, either.

I'm rarely impressed by payment processors, but this one definitely handled their business, and are worth dealing with.

BFL, could take several lessons from these guys about customer service.

-- Smoov

Depends on how well they built it. It would probably die before that happens tho.

But, if you mean generally? Yeah, no reason why an asic wouldn't work after the rewards end.

Rewards aren't the purpose of mining, processing transactions is... Rewards are just a reward.

-- Smoov

Just bring up http://localhost:9332/static/

It'll give the version # there.

-- Smoov

Unlike the centralized pools, which pay you regular send transactions to get your share of the coin, P2Pool does not keep a central wallet to dole out rewards from.

The coin you are receiving from p2pool mining, are generated transactions, just like if you are mining solo.

Generated coin takes more transactions to confirm them in the block chain before they are released.

6 confirmations for sent coins, 120 confirmations for generated coins.

The centralized pools have to wait 120 confirmations for the coins the pool generates, but typically have a stash of already matured coin to draw from for payouts. Either the pool operator has added them in, or the matured coin is from other miners who haven't withdrawn payouts yet.

Anyways, that's why you're seeing more confirmations. Once they have the 120 confirmations, you are left with freshly minted coin nobody else has had in their wallet yet.

-- Smoov

Didn't miss it at all...

The point being: mining's purpose is to process transactions and get them into the block chain... not mining for the reward at the expense of that purpose.

Anyways, way to miss a joke.

-- Smoov

Standard operating procedure for any new/next-generation product that has ever came out.

Nothing to see here, move along...

-- Smoov

Like... (counts on fingers)... almost twice as big!

-- Smoov

I'm a bit unhappy about the announcement mailing list not being used as well. Why did I bother signing up for it?

-- Smoov

Depends on how quickly our found block, propagates through the bitcoin network. Size and complexity of the block can contribute to how long it takes, but being decentralized, we will still expect orphans.

-- Smoov

That efficiency, relates to the share chain. If your own efficiency, is in line with the whole network's efficiency rate, then you are where you should be as far as getting your average number of shares.

With a decentralized network, and the rapid rate shares are generated, ~9% of stale/dead shares isn't unusual.

For example, this is my efficiency right now --> Efficiency: ~75.6% (46-96%)

I restarted p2pool a little while ago, so it doesn't have a lot of shares to give a very accurate efficiency yet, however, the pool's efficiency (100% - stale rate%), of 90.2% (stale rate 9.8%), is within my margin for error, 46-96%, so for now, I'm ok. As I get more shares, that spread will get smaller, narrowing down what my actual efficiency is.

As long as my spread, stays where the pool's efficiency falls within my spread, then my proportion of shares should be ok.

-- Smoov

That's not how the merged mining works...

Only the primary coin is pooled with the share chain, so computers mining off of your p2pool, can use a specific address, and their address will be injected into the chain, instead of yours, for payouts. Your primary coin would be BTC or LTC depending on the network you set it up for.

All of your --merged mining coins, however, are not pooled. You are strictly solo mining those. You would get the rewards on those. No address gets passed from the miner to the --merged coin.

Anyone mining on your node, would be donating their hash power, towards your solo mining the --merged coin. If you wanted to distribute your --merged coin to the people mining on your node, you have to do that externally, p2pool does not support that.

-- Smoov

our shares are persistent over a period of time... I believe it is for 24 hours, or the expected amount of work it would take to find 3 blocks, whichever is lower. (better explained by others)

So, if I stop mining, while my payout is 0.0377... the shares I have persist until they fall off the end of the chain in a FIFO method. If the pool finds 2 blocks, within the next 12 hours, I would get a payout for those 2 blocks, based on my shares that haven't fallen off of the share chain yet.

Perhaps this is what the poster meant by work lasting longer than a round?

-- Smoov

The plus side of his analysis, is, after taking into account the concerns we were already debating in the other thread, the rest of his data confirms that p2pool is being fair with its members when it comes to payouts, which is a good thing for p2pool's reputation.

I also think it is good he ran the data when he did.

Since forrestv has made some changes that should have a direct effect (fingers crossed) on reducing our orphan rate, we now have a 'before' analysis put together, which can be used to compare against p2pool's statistics, post-change, once there are enough data points to make a reasonable analysis, to see exactly how those changes have improved things (fingers still crossed).

-- Smoov

He was being fair.

It is about the numbers, period.

In fact, his analysis, was helpful in validating some of the concerns some of us have posted about long-term luck.

Whether we like or dislike the results, fitting or not fitting our own conclusions, is irrelevant to the data.

-- Smoov

Also has the side effect, of keeping the difficulty growing at a slower rate than it could be growing with more FPGA's coming online, before the halving.

-- Smoov

Yeah... and I do recall reading that some of the other FPGA's were more power-friendly than the BFL ones too...

If those suppliers have a quick turn-around time, might still be worth picking at least 1 up tho. Think there will be lots of time before the BFL ASIC's will be in anyone's hands... certainly not before the halving...

-- Smoov

Yeah, but you'd have the option of trading it in for some credit on the asics... I don't have that option.

-- Smoov

Perhaps you should look closer at the hash rate I said.

Right now, I can afford the gpu I was thinking of getting...
Right now, I can't afford the asic.

If I buy the gpu, by the time the asic becomes available for pre-order, I won't be able to afford it.
If I don't buy the gpu, by then, I will be able to.

If you wanna laugh at my hash rate, go right ahead, you won't be the first, and I expect it.

But damn, at least do your math.

-- Smoov

I was going to cash out a few of my coins, to pick up another low-hash gpu, which would double what my current 2 gpu's are doing (total ~160MH/s)... but, if the price point on that small 3.5GH/s one holds, I'm going to hold out and get that instead.

That single they're currently selling, was priced too high for what little I've been able to mine, but that 3.5 asic? ... yeah, I got enough for that.

I'm hoping that it isn't just hype. If it turns out that it was, I'm gonna be pretty pissed.

-- Smoov

Ok, that's good then... I haven't checked lately.

Thanks for that

-- Smoov