[1500 TH] p2pool: Decentralized, DoS-resistant, Hop-Proof pool

[forrestv]

P2Pool release 17.0 - commit hash: 62fa7b020b82a92138d7652c26be2953b26fd4e5

HARDFORK - Upgrade URGENTLY required in the next few days.

Windows binary: http://u.forre.st/u/iqvaqprd/p2pool_win32_17.0.zip
Windows binary signature: http://u.forre.st/u/ysrjpsls/p2pool_win32_17.0.zip.sig
Source zipball: https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/zipball/17.0
Source tarball: https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/tarball/17.0

Changes:

* SegWit compatibility
* Increased new transactions size limit per share to allow producing larger blocks
* Requires Bitcoin >= 0.13.1

SegWit (segregated witness) **has already activated** and for P2Pool to continue working without producing invalid blocks, everyone needs to upgrade. At 50% of our hashrate upgrading, P2Pool instances will start displaying a warning saying that an upgrade is required. Reaching that point as quickly as possible is very important. And then, at 95%, users that have not upgraded will be excluded. If non-upgraded users aren't excluded soon enough, P2Pool users will be subject to paying other users for invalid work - effectively a withholding attack.

Due to SegWit already activating upgraded users of P2Pool must not mine SegWit transactions as they are incompatible with older P2Pool versions. After v17 shares activate a new release will be made which removes this restriction.

So, please upgrade to 17.0 now and also tell everyone else to.

P2Pool is a decentralized pool that works by creating a P2P network of miner nodes. These nodes work on a chain of shares similar to Bitcoin's blockchain. Each node works on a block that includes payouts to the previous shares' owners and the node itself. There is no central point of failure, making it DoS resistant.

Related:
P2Pool homepage: http://p2pool.in/
P2Pool stats page, made by twmz: http://p2pool.info/
P2Pool subsidies - Several people are donating to all people using P2Pool in order to promote its decentralized nature - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57027.0
Litecoin P2Pool status - http://p2pool.litecointools.com/

Things that are not P2Pool (and just people running P2Pool): p2pool.org

Graphs: http://p2pool.info/ http://forre.st:9332/

P2Pool wiki page | GitHub project page
New: Mailing list for urgent news (updates, bugs): http://groups.google.com/group/p2pool-notifications

List of all blocks found: http://blockexplorer.com/address/1Kz5QaUPDtKrj5SqW5tFkn7WZh8LmQaQi4

Getting P2Pool

• Run bitcoin with the RPC interface enabled - see the next section for instructions on how to do this
• Download p2pool: (see links at top for binaries!)
  
  • git: git clone git://github.com/forrestv/p2pool.git
• Run p2pool:
  
  • Windows py2exe: run_p2pool.exe
  • Source: python run_p2pool.py
• Run a miner daemon (see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool#Miners ) with long polling connecting to 127.0.0.1 on port 9332 with any username and password
  
  • With all miners, using a high FPS target (30?) or a low intensity (7?) helps a lot with reducing stales.

HOWTO: Bitcoin server mode
You must be running the Bitcoin client, and it must have its RPC interface enabled.

Open the Bitcoin data folder. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory

Make a new file named bitcoin.conf (not bitcoin.conf.txt! You might have to go into Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Folder Options > View and uncheck 'Hide extensions for known file types'). Paste this into it:

rpcpassword=<A LONG RANDOM PASSWORD THAT YOU DON'T HAVE TO REMEMBER>
server=1


Dependencies for running FROM SOURCE:

• Bitcoin 0.5.0 or higher
• Python 2.5 or higher
• python-argparse for Python 2.6 and lower
• Twisted (Ubuntu package python-twisted)

Additional options of interest:
    -w PORT: Listen for workers on a port other than 9332.
    -a BITCOIN_ADDRESS: Mine to this address instead of requesting one from Bitcoin.

Last, forward port 9333 through your firewall to the host running p2pool! (Oh, and join #p2pool on freenode!)

[gmaxwell]

In the time since P2Pool's original announcement it has evolved considerably.  I thought  having to wade through hundreds of pages of inapplicable cruft about old versions of the software to get to useful information was a disservice to people here, so I split off the old discussion to a separate archival thread.

P2Pool has come a long way since its humble beginnings: It's now a completely realistic solution for a great many miners. The software is still rapidly developing but it is reliable, featureful, and, of course, P2Pool is critical for the health and welfare of the Bitcoin system: Our trust in the Bitcoin system depends on it being highly decentralized. P2Pool prevents the centralization that non-distributed pools create.  This is important enough to people that P2Pool miners are currently being paid by Bitcoin users to participate.  P2Pool pools payments but mining decisions are still left to all the miners just as bitcoin was intended to work.

This "pool" (really a decentralized/distributed network just like Bitcoin) is still attractive even for people who aren't thinking about the health of Bitcoin overall. P2pool's decentralization is accomplished without compromising on miner profits and, unlike solo mining, while still allowing stable income. The things which p2pool can't do, like provide the utmost low variance (PPS) are offset by the lack of fees and by removing the risk of cheating by pool operators (which is almost undetectable if only done in moderation).

P2Pool isn't ideal for low speed (e.g. CPU) miners, and may never be— but it's absolutely a no brainier for anyone who would even consider solo-mining and a good majority of the people in between.

I'm personally really happy about the new built in per-worker graphs:


I hope to see more useful monitoring features in the future.

[coblee]

Everyone should start using p2pool. It's the most innovative things since bitcoin itself. It bothers me that Gavin has try to convince Tycho (of deepbit) of his multi-sig proposal before he can implement it, because if deepbit decides to not use the new code, it's dead in the water. And that's so wrong. So people, wake up and use p2pool.

Keep up the good work, forrestv!

[gnar1ta$]

What is the likely cause of this?

Code:

 > Failure: twisted.internet.defer.TimeoutError: Getting http://127.0.0.1:8332/ took longer than 5 seconds.

Fairly frequent.  P2pool and bitcoind are running on the same system.

[eja]

I see the same error when running p2pool and bitcoind on the same (fairly underpowered) system, an asus eeebox with intel atom cpu.
There are load spikes every now and then where bitcoind and p2pool together peg the cpu at 100% and then these errors appear.

It seemed to cause more than average orphans and dead shares in my case so I now run p2pool and bitcoind on a faster system, and I've never seen the error there.

[gnar1ta$]

Thank you eja, I have had many stales and now just watched the CPU spike. I'll try on a different system.

[LightRider]

Glad to see the pool grow, and looking forward to its integration with the standard client.

The latest Win32 release doesn't seem to be mentioned in the OP, BTW.

[hoo]

I don't quite understand something that I was asking about in the thread that was just closed.

Which is better to be using?

Nightly snapshots from here:
https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/zipball/master

Or the latest executables scattered about?

----------

Also, what are the dependencies for the graphs?

I have all these:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/2640/p2pool-crashes-the-bitcoin-client/2643#2643

    Download latest current p2pool code and extract to "%programfiles%\p2pool" - https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/zipball/master

    Download and install latest Python 2.7 (if you get 64bit, you'll need 64bit versions of the packages below) - http://www.python.org/download/

    Download and install python extension package twisted - http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#twisted

    Download and install python extension package zope.interface - http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#zope.interface

    Download and install python extension package pil - http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pil

    Download and install python extension package pygame - http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pygame

but the graphs do not work, from what I have read it seems the problem is not having rrdtool, however I'm having trouble finding a current win32 version of rrdtool, it is also not in activestate.

Thanks

[LightRider]

Getting "Found NONCE not accepted by Target" messages on latest version of Ufasoft's miner when connecting to latest win32 version of p2pool.

[btc_artist]

Watching

[Frizz23]

In reply to "Holliday"s post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61131.msg712520#msg712520):  "What exactly is the problem again?"

The problem is, that - according to the logs - I (we) work on the same block since days. A look at my wallet also confirms that:
http://blockexplorer.com/address/17fLZeWn31xf9wruWa7EpjoCEJtEyvmANQ

I haven't received any BTC since a few days now.

That's why I said: "I think p2pool is not for me. To risky. Or buggy. Or both ..."

[gnar1ta$]

Re: Frizz23 if p2pool was running the subsidy payments should have came in. How are you launching p2pool? Are you using -a <address> with the same address every restart?

[thirdlight]

This page is really good for seeing "pool" stats. I've you think you've found a share, and your address is not in this list, then something's wrong.

Check the log (it's in "<folder-where-you-put-p2pool>/data/bitcoin/") to see what happened at start up.

Let us know what you find!

[Costia]

installed from GIT:

http://127.0.0.1:9332/graphs/

Install python-rrdtool!

didnt find an easy way to install rrdtool on windows

looking for a way to check my hash rate remotely

does the higher acceptance rate of the git version affects client in any way? if a lower difficulty solution is found does it still look for another one (because the lower difficulty solutions dont really count as shares)?

[niooron]

Where can I download the chain? I've been running p2pool for a day and it's at 12000/17000. It's so slow.

[forrestv]

Where can I download the chain? I've been running p2pool for a day and it's at 12000/17000. It's so slow.

It's already done. You don't need them to all be verified to mine... That's a bit confusing.

[ThePok]

We need a Message "You can connect the miner now!"

niooron, it doesnt need all 17k shares! As soon as its gets slow (1 share every 10 sec) you have all important shares! GUI and messages is realy crap!!!! FORREST CHANGE IT

[JWU42]

I'm personally really happy about the new built in per-worker graphs:

[graphs removed --gmaxwell]

So you need to have several bitcoind's running with a different user pass in each?

[JWU42]

To get the per miner graphs...

[dirtycat]

What is the likely cause of this?

Code:

 > Failure: twisted.internet.defer.TimeoutError: Getting http://127.0.0.1:8332/ took longer than 5 seconds.

Fairly frequent.  P2pool and bitcoind are running on the same system.

I get this also about once every 5 minutes.

I see the same error when running p2pool and bitcoind on the same (fairly underpowered) system, an asus eeebox with intel atom cpu.
There are load spikes every now and then where bitcoind and p2pool together peg the cpu at 100% and then these errors appear.

It seemed to cause more than average orphans and dead shares in my case so I now run p2pool and bitcoind on a faster system, and I've never seen the error there.

I have noticed it does occur when the cpu spikes to 100%.. would a sempron 145 and 2 gigs of ram be considered underpowered?