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

[bitpop]

p2pool mhash is a big guesstimate

[kano]

The address getting the largest (now failed) payments is: 1FcTuPJzdekvzTyQ5dXsnsVyT4F5G1tCjc
If it is P2Pool though, it's slightly modified
(it doesn't have the 0 BTC payment tacked on the end of all P2Pool coinbase txn's - but I wonder if it is documented anywhere what that actually is?)

They can't be P2Pool blocks - the 0 output at the end is essential to P2Pool's operation. It links P2Pool's internal data for a particular share to the block that share would have mined. (The other alternative is sticking it in the coinbase, but the coinbase of the block that I looked at is nearly empty.)

That's why I was saying that if it was a P2Pool it has been modified.

The 2 reasons for thinking it is something like P2Pool are that every block (that I looked at) comes from a different IP address and it uses the coinbase payments.

The fact that they are generating bad blocks (including a bad txn) means of course that they are running non-upgraded bitcoind's
Anyway, I guess if no one reading here knows about it, it can't be helped.

Pity it's wasting even a small amount of hashing power (a bit more that a block a week)

[Doff]

Local rate: 866MH/s (2.5% DOA)

Shares: 17 total (2 orphaned, 1 dead) Efficiency: 89.90%

Are these normal stats for P2pool?  2 Orphaned 1 dead, seems bad but I'm not sure. I love using this pool but I always feel like I'm just losing BTC when I use it for some reason.

Maybe someone can educate me as to what a normal payout I could expect in a 24hr  period with that hash rate, orphaned, and dead.

[ragnard]

I have very high efficiency with my current p2pool setup.  Here are my current stats (it has been a week or two since I most recently restarted p2pool):

Code:

Shares: 896 (22 orphan, 10 dead) Stale rate: ~3.6% (2-5%) Efficiency: ~102.6% (101-104%) 

I have been consistently getting approx 3.5% stale rate for the past month or so, so this is not a fluke.  Here are some musings...

Just to add for comparison.  I'm running my p2pool node on a VMWare virtual machine on a pretty new Dell Poweredge in a datacenter with a 100Mbps fiber uplink to large Internet backbone providers.

My p2pool node was restarted a couple weeks ago and since then I have these stats:

Code:

Stale rate: ~4.3% (1-9%) Efficiency: ~105.1% (100-108%)

and

Code:

load average: 0.10, 0.06, 0.05

My 2 miners with around 700MH/s connect to the p2pool server over the Internet and have ~20ms RTT ping to it.  So, running on a virtual machine does pretty good.  Assuming a somewhat modern server, I think the quality of your connectivity is more important.  I should also note that another virtual machine on the same server is running the CPU at 100% doing litecoin mining, so the server is being worked plenty hard.

[forrestv]

That's why I was saying that if it was a P2Pool it has been modified.

The 2 reasons for thinking it is something like P2Pool are that every block (that I looked at) comes from a different IP address and it uses the coinbase payments.

The fact that they are generating bad blocks (including a bad txn) means of course that they are running non-upgraded bitcoind's
Anyway, I guess if no one reading here knows about it, it can't be helped.

Pity it's wasting even a small amount of hashing power (a bit more that a block a week)

I believe that they're BitPenny blocks - they were discussed in IRC yesterday.

[Shadow383]

Luck really has been awful on p2pool lately - a friend of mine's getting into mining with his dual 7970 gaming PC, got him to point them at p2pool.
Result = 15 hours of 1.3Ghash/s with nothing to show for it thanks to the orphaned block today 

Needless to say, he's switched to standard PPS pools 

Our overall luck since p2pool started though is horrific! Mathematically I make it something like a 2% chance of a pool doing this badly over that time period.

[cabin]

Luck really has been awful on p2pool lately - a friend of mine's getting into mining with his dual 7970 gaming PC, got him to point them at p2pool.
Result = 15 hours of 1.3Ghash/s with nothing to show for it thanks to the orphaned block today 

Needless to say, he's switched to standard PPS pools 

Our overall luck since p2pool started though is horrific! Mathematically I make it something like a 2% chance of a pool doing this badly over that time period.

If it is something other than variance, it is probably the orphans. Compared to a big pool your average P2Pool user has:
- a slower, higher latency internet connection
- a stock, unoptimized bitcoind
- may not have any incoming bitcoind connections at all because port 8333 is blocked

These things put them at a disadvantage and may result in slightly more orphans, which just looks like slightly worse luck since I don't think we can track down all the orphans at the moment.

[Gabi]

Nice, your friend is now paying useless fees. His fault, i don't care 

[iopq]

Luck really has been awful on p2pool lately - a friend of mine's getting into mining with his dual 7970 gaming PC, got him to point them at p2pool.
Result = 15 hours of 1.3Ghash/s with nothing to show for it thanks to the orphaned block today 

Needless to say, he's switched to standard PPS pools 

Our overall luck since p2pool started though is horrific! Mathematically I make it something like a 2% chance of a pool doing this badly over that time period.

both of the pools I mined on have went down
the back-up first and then the main, lol

p2pool will never go down or have lag or have its wallet stolen

[arklan]

is there any theory as to WHY p2pool's having os much trouble lately? is it pure probability playing out?

[DeathAndTaxes]

If it is something other than variance, it is probably the orphans. Compared to a big pool your average P2Pool user has:
- a slower, higher latency internet connection
- a stock, unoptimized bitcoind
- may not have any incoming bitcoind connections at all because port 8333 is blocked

Share orphans don't have any effect on block generation rate.  Period.  Shares are completely worthless and just a method to track division of work and profits.

Poor connection to the bitcoin network could result in higher BLOCK orphans but p2pool has <1% block orphan rate which is similar to other pools.

[twmz]

Poor connection to the bitcoin network could result in higher BLOCK orphans but p2pool has <1% block orphan rate which is similar to other pools.

We have 331 total blocks and 6 of them orphaned.  That's a rate of 1.8%.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Poor connection to the bitcoin network could result in higher BLOCK orphans but p2pool has <1% block orphan rate which is similar to other pools.

We have 331 total blocks and 6 of them orphaned.  That's a rate of 1.8%.

OK stand corrected.  The larger point is that share orphans don't affect the pools payout.  Only orphaned blocks do.  Most well running pools lose about 1% to 2% of revenue due to orphaned blocks.

So if we consider <1% to be optimal.  Then at worse p2pool is 1% worse than optimal.

[cabin]

Poor connection to the bitcoin network could result in higher BLOCK orphans but p2pool has <1% block orphan rate which is similar to other pools.

We have 331 total blocks and 6 of them orphaned.  That's a rate of 1.8%.

The note about orphans on http://p2pool.info/ suggests that the real number is higher than that too. A pool can count every one of their orphans but we can't. Would be nice to know for sure one way or another if the block orphans are a big factor or not. (The share orphans are a non-issue)

[gyverlb]

Let's talk numbers and theory. My theory is that orphans (p2pool's stale shares or Bitcoin's orphan blocks) are caused by latencies between the miner, p2pool node, p2pool network for p2pool stale shares and miner, p2pool node, bitcoind and the Bitcoin P2P network for orphan blocks.

Furthermore, as I understand things, the amount of stale shares should be proportional to the miner/p2pool node/p2pool network latencies. For example, if on average a share comes every 10 seconds and on average the latency is around 100ms for all miners, we should have 1% of stale shares (there's a ~1 in 100 chances that another valid share can be found by a node until it knows the share and inform miners to work on it). We have around 8% stale shares right now, so I estimate the latencies between miners on the p2pool network to be around 800ms (seems high at first but isn't too bad when you consider that the p2pool network should cover the whole planet and there are at least 3 components involved in latencies : miner, p2pool node and bitcoind process).

If bitcoind and the Bitcoin network were roughly as efficient as p2pool, the amount of orphans should be around 800ms/10min (in fact around 1/60 the proportion of p2pool's stale share given the target interval difference). Currently it should be 0.133% instead of 1.8%. Although 1.8% can't impact us much (our luck is around 90%, so if there's a problem, it isn't caused by orphan blocks), it's rather high when compared to what p2pool can achieve with a 10 seconds target interval instead of a 10 minutes. Either bitcoind isn't optimized or the size of the Bitcoin network compared to p2pool adds noticeable latencies.

[twmz]

Poor connection to the bitcoin network could result in higher BLOCK orphans but p2pool has <1% block orphan rate which is similar to other pools.

We have 331 total blocks and 6 of them orphaned.  That's a rate of 1.8%.

The note about orphans on http://p2pool.info/ suggests that the real number is higher than that too. A pool can count every one of their orphans but we can't. Would be nice to know for sure one way or another if the block orphans are a big factor or not. (The share orphans are a non-issue)

Note, the orphans that are known (the 6 on p2pool.info) are already accounted for in the luck calculations (i.e. luck is not reduced by known orphans).  The only think that could, in theory, be making the luck look lower than it should is unknown orphans, and I don't think there are many of them.  While the statement I made on p2pool.info is technically accurate, I do scan blockchain.info regularly looking for orphaned blocks and it does a pretty solid job of knowing about all orphaned blocks because it connects to 3000+ bitcoin nodes.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Might be worth running the calculation to see how much hashpower it would cost a large competitor (pool) to run a p2pool node and refrain from sending in blocks. It would need to do this only at a level that makes p2pools persistent "bad luck" slightly worse than paying fees at pools to be effective.

Back of envelope says 5-10% has gone missing somewhere, assuming it is not all bad luck, so say around 30 GHash/s? Would it be worth it to "them"?

[Ente]

Might be worth running the calculation to see how much hashpower it would cost a large competitor (pool) to run a p2pool node and refrain from sending in blocks. It would need to do this only at a level that makes p2pools persistent "bad luck" slightly worse than paying fees at pools to be effective.

Back of envelope says 5-10% has gone missing somewhere, assuming it is not all bad luck, so say around 30 GHash/s? Would it be worth it to "them"?

"Worth"? That assumes some gain by doing that. To drive away p2pool-users? It would be easier by a magnitude to use those 30Gh/s to "normally" mine for profit, and attack a regular centralized pool with DDOS. That would drive off their users to some degree, maybe attracting some of them for his own pool.

All data is there already anyway. We see which nodes exist, which nodes contribute how many shares (to add to the p2pool net hashpower) and which nodes do or do not find bitcoin blocks (to reduce the luck). If someone wants, he should be able to dig through the stats to verify/falsify this. Even if those 30Gh/s were on dozens of individual nodes, they probably come from the same IP. Even if not, with 30Gh/s you should be able to find anything, any clue.

You see, even with this "bad luck", people are sticking to p2pool, as can be seen in the stats. Not because p2pool is necessarily paying out better than all other pools at any time, but because p2pool is superior and healthier for the whole bitcoin universe.

But yes. I believe p2pool has a problem which may have stayed unidentified yet. The "hashing power reflected by hashes" and "hashing power reflected by blocks" are two fairly straight lines, but clearly diverging. Its not two overlapping lines, its not one line being crossed by the other all the time.
Connectivity seems to be one problem for the individual miner. Not for the global p2pool efficiency though.

Ente

[marcus_of_augustus]

No need to get all uppity, I'm just trying to eliminate some possibilities to get to the bottom of the pool's poor performance ... it may be bad luck but it is looking like more than that the longer it continues.

[ChanceCoats123]

Not to mention people are staying with p2pool because they are lazy... (this guy). All jokes aside, it's easy to stay with the familiar.