Ouch, my week has sucked as well, but not that bad.  Best wishes..

I do have a question tho - when I log into the nasty fans site, on my home page I have "payments on hold".  Wondering what that means?

I have one minted 1oz seat, and 9 online seats.  I do see under the donations link that I have received donations and distributions, and I have checked the coin explorer page on uberbills (love that you can do that).  The amount on the coin explorer shows an amount that is the sum of what's under my donation history, as well as the "on hold" section in the home page.

So, just wondering how that all works...

Ok, so being new to this, how does one get onto the live chat?  I don't remember seeing it in my user control panel thing.

It would take one diff adjustment where transaction processing took longer, then after the adjustment it would be back to normal.  The whole idea of the diff is to maintain a 10-minute block rate, right?  If that's true, then if the diff drops big it should re-adjust downward enough to be able to return to a 10-minute block finding rate, thus transactions go back to normal.

Not sure how micropayments are connected to the core problems of P2Pool being the performance/scalability and the relativity of higher hashrate to larger share diffs.

Unless it's in reference to what was said before, the ability to "credit" smaller miners for work they have completed which may have fallen off the chain because there's been no block in more than 3 days.

Then build the code so that every node keeps that information store, instead of just 3 or however many, and then it's not centralized.  99% of the nodes could then drop off and as long as one is running you're still good.

The biggest hurdle is the "caretaker" of the wallet holding the BTC during the current "round", or don't have the concept of a round, and continue to use immediate PPLNS payouts to worker addresses.  Then you're also not centralized there either.

So, here's an oddball suggestion to re-think P2Pool.

Does the mining itself really have to be distributed?  What if we all "solo-mined", but then pooled together the solved block income and then just distributed the income amongst all miners recorded as having done work?

It would be a centralized, de-centralized pool.  Follow me on this...

First, why re-invent the wheel and try to rewrite the P2Pool code?  We know the inherent issues with it and it seems that most agree it is a daunting, if insurmountable, task given the time required to do so and the lack of the most important thing - money - to provide the incentive.

It would seem to me to be a much better use of resources to find things that could be leveraged together that already exist, and just contract those to write the needed subsequent "glue" bits to make it all work.

I've been mining on Nastypool, with the NastyPoP payout method, and this is what gave me the idea.

Why not use the CKpool/CKDB solo method, and have everyone currently running a P2Pool node setup their own CKPool solo nodes.  Miners connect to them and it would be pretty much normal solo mining, without the issues of ever increasing share difficulty.  Latency would be no longer an issue, because you're not racing each other and the other nodes to get your shares in the chain faster, you could mine wherever and have more of your work count, instead of being DOA.

Then, at the top level, here's the code that would need to be implemented - the ability to catalog and share the information about each miner on each node, the amount of work they're doing, and finally the blocks that are solved.

From that info, you could run periodic payouts for all miners (maybe weekly, every 3 or 5 days, whatever) based upon all the pooled BTC from all the blocks and transactions solved during that period.

You could implement a 3 of 5 majority (5 of 7, whatever of whatever), where trusted stakeholders (windpath, CK/Kano, etc) run the major nodes which form a distributed cluster of the main information store.  You could also have one entity hold the "hot" wallet containing that rounds' BTC, and payout the distributions. 

The resources for pool nodes and onwers would be less, since you'd probably need to only replicate database transactions now, instead of full sharechains, etc.
The CKpool code is written in C/C++ and is performant and scalable, something which P2Pool will never be.

If the theory of luck and variance holds true, where over time an amount of hashrate will still solve the same amount of blocks, it shouldn't matter whether you're solo mining with 200GH/s, or 200TH/s, over time you'll still get the same payout.  Even if your miner never solved a block on your own solo node, you'd still get equal payouts from the nodes who did solve them.

If you leave the 0.9% (or even round it up to 1.0%) fee in there like CK/Kano have for their pool, it allows money to flow back to the developers who are spending their time writing and maintaining this.  If you do round it up to 1.0%, maybe that 0.1% could be re-distributed to those running a pool node, as a thank you for the services.  As much as I like 0 fee, it really doesn't draw people in anymore - I see pools with 4% fees running with miners on them, because they offer a gamble at something.

I don't know, just tossing the idea out there.  Might be completely stupid and unfeasible, but honestly at this point I think P2Pool's days are numbered without finding a solution, and it'll probably have to be pretty radical for it to work.

Either works fine.  I run both S5's and SP35's and they work equally well.  I like the build quality of the Spondoolies gear over the Antminers hands down.

Biggest issue is latency.  I rent my miners also and I see very big swings in hash power for the same gear with folks who I know have used pool servers physically distant from where my miners are.

I'd like to guess -3.16 so I guess the range of -3.0 to -3.25 please.

IMHO, if you came out with something like 4U/5Kw/3 or 4 board version in the 20-25TH range you'd make a killing.  I think that would still keep the home miner in the game as basically anyone with 5 SP20's running today should/would be able to convert over to this. As with the SP30/31/35 the rack mount form factor would be great for those of us in a datacenter setting.

Apparently I hit #344479, you're welcome...

The funny thing is, I was one of those who left P2Pool ... then found the block on another P2Pool node...

Right after the back-to-back 4 day droughts (right before the last horrible 8-day one) I decided to split up my total hash rate off of just P2Pool to diversify.  I tossed about an equal 1/3 each P2Pool, Kano, and NastyPool.  Turns out I found the block with my miner on NastyPool which has been running about a week, after mining on my own node for over 6 months with nothing.

As with the past, I knew the pool would come back around and make up for itself, but I loathe the idea of "wasting" work, which wasn't a problem until recently when we went >3 days between blocks and shares started falling off.

Woohoo!  /me does a little dance to celebrate

This is my reward for taking the last 5oz minted seat pre-order earlier today I guess...

(yes, this was my address)

Is there still 1 pre-order left?  I'd be interested if so.

2.6.14 was available today for download for the SP35.  Just got my units and powered them on yesterday, they shipped with 2.5.something.

With the shipped FW version the units were barely doing 3TH/s.  With 2.6.14 so far they're running about 5.4 TH/s after an hour.

Without needing to flip through all 500 pages of the thread, is there any good summary on tuning the SP35 for max performance?  I'm in a datacenter setting with 240V power and am looking for best hashrate, not the best power usage.

I'm a big fan of P2Pool, run my own node and have been mining it for quite many months.

However, lately we've crossed the 3-day threshold for blocks (3 times in the past 2 weeks), which means work is being wasted as after 3 days shares in the chain start to fall off.

I've been splitting my hash between BTCGuild and P2Pool for the past month.  Take away the recent variance issues and P2Pool has out-earned it by a good margin.  Recently though BTC guild has caught up and surpassed with these few days without a block on P2Pool.

I'm heavily considering switching at least the workers over form BTCGuild to CKPool.  At the least, the fees are less on CKPool and I'm for sure liking the fact that it's run by the core cgminer DEVs so it's quite trustable as well (no knock on the other pools).  It's much harder for me to move from P2Pool even with the variance, but if there's many more stretches which go for 3+ days without a block I don't think there's much choice.

Good luck with the SP20's.  As an owner of many S5's, I would say probably a good choice to go with the SP hardware.  The build quality of the S5 has gone way down from the S3.  Although it's a more favorable comparison on paper for the W/GH, you can undervolt the SP20 to achieve basically the same numbers, from a product that seems to be much more well built and capable of hashing solidly at those speeds.

I'm down 1/6th of my original purchase of S5's due to various problems - mainly having a whole chain die and leaving the machine running at half speed.  I'm not going to bother replacing them and just ordered a couple SP-35's instead as replacements so as the S5's die I'll just slowly switch to SP gear.

I believe there's a thread for it:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=933536.0

You'll never get to 20 density in a single rack with normal "off the shelf" power parts, and most likely also not achieve cooling for it.  You're talking 140kw in a single rack, most US data centers top out at being able to handle 20-30kw per rack for cooling.

That being said, if you have enough cooling you could possibly make 16 per rack using something like an APC 9750 PDU.  The PDU you showed will be able to handle 2 SP-35's per.  But since it's a zero-u PDU you can only put 2 per rack thus only 4 total SP-35's.  You'll need to go with the horizontal ones to fit more. 

In this configuration you would have 2 units per 1 PDU so 16 Sp-35 and 8 PDUs would give you 40u used with 5u available.

If your electricity isn't free, or even under $.03/Kw, it will most likely be a losing proposition.

However, if you're getting the electricity for free, then by all means power them up, it's stupid not to.  If they're in good condition you're looking at upwards of 35TH for all 24 units, which will net you on average about .4 BTC / daily (luck notwithstanding) at today's difficulty.

Some units run rock solid and will be fine.  Others may (will) slowly die off as they overheat and succumb to the typical problems seen on those units.

Either way, might as well run them into the ground and get something for it.

I'm not a big fan of the "chain" design on the S5's.  I'm down 3 S5's in under 2 weeks because of it.  When one chip goes, the whole hashboard is toast (not physically), 30X's.  At least with the S1/S3 you could blow a chip here and there and the rest of the board would still hash fine, albeit slightly slower.  Now, you lose the whole damn thing and are down half a miner in one shot.

One of them burnt up immediately after turning on, the fan didn't spin and we didn't catch it in time, the smell alerted us to something wrong.  I'm not sure if it would have physically burnt, but it was certainly too hot to touch right after powering it off.

The open air design itself shouldn't be a fire hazard, however, unless you've got metal on metal and an open wire hits it.

Most of them do reliably overclock to 387.5, resulting in roughly 1.25TH.  Some are decently stable at 412.5 @ 1.35TH.  Some are unstable at the stock speed.

Unfortunately that page is very out of date, and yes, you are looking at a scam piece of hardware.  They don't even list the Ant S5 yet, and they're still listing BFL hardware which I won't even bother to get into here.

With your power at $.12-.13 it will be very difficult to turn a decent profit, although technically you could ROI given enough time.  Also in the winter you could use your miner to provide heat in the house which may supplant the cost of your normal method of heating.

I suggest going through the mining hardware section of the forums, and also the hardware for-sale section and buying a used miner from there.  That will give you the best chance to make even a small profit on mining.

The key is information, if you don't do enough research you will for sure lose money, no doubt.