Orphaned shares

[Boognish]

Hey, just a quick question.  I am relatively new to Bitcoin and have been running it for a few days on a new gaming rig I put together. So I've been running on P2Pool with cgminer with no problems since I started.  Getting ~350MHs, getting my payouts, it's interesting, I'm having fun.

Just this afternoon, all of the shares that I've had accepted by P2Pool have been "orphaned".  Is there any particular reason this happens?  Just bad luck?

Thanks!

[Davyd05]

think that has something to do when a block is invalid or, something along those lines perhaps someone else with more knowledge will chime in

[Boognish]

Yea not really sure what happened.  After the post I shut down the programs, made sure everything was up to date and rebooted.  It still returned orphaned shares for another hour or two but then went back to normal. 

Guess it's just luck or something
/shrug

[Wandering Albatross]

I've read about orphaned blocks but not sure about orphaned shares. It may just mean that you had shares that you were working on but while you were working on them the solution was found so they were no longer relevant.

[RandyFolds]

It likely means that the block you were contributing hashes for was orphaned. It happens here and there, but I think the odds of it occurring are like, .5% or something low like that.

This thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61170.60 has a lot of discussion on P2Pool and the incidence of orphaned blocks. Keep an eye out for DeathAndTaxes' posts. I think he does the math somewhere in there.

[Boognish]

Thanks Randy, I'll read through the post