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

[norgan]

3. Vertical scalability that reduces variance for all miners.

This is where the real challenges lie.

For p2pool to support large mining operations, and still be able to attract medium, small, and micro miners we need completely new share difficulty and payout structures.

The first step here has nothing to do with code, some completely new concepts need to be developed and generally accepted by p2pool miners. Once we have those concepts down, and can demonstrate them to be technically possible, we can seek out devs with the chops to pull it off.

This may seem like no big deal, but I assure you it is. Here is my first crack at it:

Payouts
While miners meeting a certain threshold could still be paid directly from the generation TX, smaller miners under the payout threshold when a block is found, lets say BTC0.01 to start, would be able to see their p2pool earnings down to the Satoshi in real time, but would not receive a payout until reaching the threshold.

We (read as: nonnakip) are currently developing pretty much this exact thing right now for our node at nastyfans.org:9332.  We have been calling it P2Pool PPS...

Cool, is this something you will submit back to github?

[1714221189]

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[1714221189]

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[forrestv]

http://p2pool.info is back up, with a rewritten backend that is public at https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool.info2. Anyone can set up their own, which I'd encourage for redundancy. See the README - it's very simple to set up, simply a Python script that generates JSON that can be served statically along with the HTML/CSS/JS.

Missing data was recreated from public P2Pool nodes' historical graph data, except for the "number of users" line, which I have no way of recovering.


I'll post again shortly concerning P2Pool funding/donations and development.

[jdot007]

Thank you for that Forrest! It was sorely missed.

[kano]

...
I have built and managed large development teams in the past for specialized projects, and I have to say that none of them came close to the complexity and challenges offered by what we need in a p2pool dev team.
...

P2pool is not a massive difficult project ... forrestv is able to do it himself.

So I guess your comment above means you've only worked in small time projects

[forrestv]

As jedimstr said, I did receive a sizable donation from the Litecoin Project (EDIT: credited wrong organization), and I have since been brainstorming and prototyping ways to fix the core problems with P2Pool - scalability and excessive variance for small miners. I prototyped a way to do trustless verification of blocks with O(1) storage so that we could free most P2Pool nodes from needing a local *coin node. I've spent a ton of time thinking of ways to implement parallel sharechains so that we can have shares more often, decreasing variance for small miners, while decreasing the strict latency requirements for hardware, sadly without any concrete results yet. Because this is a hard problem. I spent hundreds of hours in the summer of 2011 thinking about how P2Pool could possibly work, in a time before merged mining or pools with coinbase payouts even existed. Any further improvements that get us out of this local maxima that we're stuck in will require comparable amounts of thought. Some relief though - a few days ago, when people prodding renewed my eagerness, I may have made a breakthrough in ideas for how to get parallel sharechains to work (which I discussed in #p2pool).

Despite that, it is hard to work on this project when most people insist on cutting off the pool donations to me. When I see guides telling people to use --give-author 0 without any mention made of what it does, people blindly following them, or people asking me for help, providing screenshots of them running P2Pool with donations disabled, it hurts a bit. Actually, more than a bit. Right now, I get 0.09% of the revenue from P2Pool due to node donations (which default to 1%), which likely means that about 90% of people have completely disabled donations. That doesn't result in much revenue. Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working, which is the equivalent of two weeks of pool donations - if I were being paid minimum wage! I don't have a job (I am a student) and I do have other side-ventures that I'm working towards that look a bit more optimistic, so pardon me for rationally allocating my free time.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development - pool donations have been comparably low for a very long time, since before this development hiatus - so I don't think I'm being "punished" for not working hard enough or obviously enough. I don't think that most miners ever think about their donation amount again after setting it or pay attention to development. (I don't blame them for not dedicating their lives to tweaking P2Pool. ) But this is vicious downward cycle and anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite. It's simply a lack of foresightedness when miners decide to prioritize an amount of income that is invisible in the noise of variance of P2Pool payouts over the sustainability of P2Pool. Perhaps we'd be better off if I hadn't changed the mandatory 0.5% fee to an optional 0.5% donation (does anyone here even remember that?).

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).

[RoadStress]

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).

Thank you for the hard work. As soon as I will organize a group buy, my next donation will go towards you. Also there might be a full or 1/2 SP10 hashing for your donation address in the appropriate future.

[cathoderay]

@ forrestv: What a sad, sad sob story.....I'm crying here.....really.....

If you can't be bothered to post updates (if any), answer questions, or communicate in the slightest despite logging on - that's your fault. You've basically admitted that nothing has happened for a year - then you moan about donations? Get real. Everything that has been said about what's not happening here is correct & you pretty much just agreed with them. If you want to see donations start to roll in again you'll have to show some kind of proof that you're actually doing something - it's gonna take more than one complaining comment every six months......

[norgan]

As jedimstr said, I did receive a sizable donation from the Litecoin foundation, and I have since been brainstorming and prototyping ways to fix the core problems with P2Pool - scalability and excessive variance for small miners. I prototyped a way to do trustless verification of blocks with O(1) storage so that we could free most P2Pool nodes from needing a local *coin node. I've spent a ton of time thinking of ways to implement parallel sharechains so that we can have shares more often, decreasing variance for small miners, while decreasing the strict latency requirements for hardware, sadly without any concrete results yet. Because this is a hard problem. I spent hundreds of hours in the summer of 2011 thinking about how P2Pool could possibly work, in a time before merged mining or pools with coinbase payouts even existed. Any further improvements that get us out of this local maxima that we're stuck in will require comparable amounts of thought. Some relief though - a few days ago, when people prodding renewed my eagerness, I may have made a breakthrough in ideas for how to get parallel sharechains to work (which I discussed in #p2pool).

Despite that, it is hard to work on this project when most people insist on cutting off the pool donations to me. When I see guides telling people to use --give-author 0 without any mention made of what it does, people blindly following them, or people asking me for help, providing screenshots of them running P2Pool with donations disabled, it hurts a bit. Actually, more than a bit. Right now, I get 0.09% of the revenue from P2Pool due to node donations (which default to 1%), which likely means that about 90% of people have completely disabled donations. That doesn't result in much revenue. Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working, which is the equivalent of two weeks of pool donations - if I were being paid minimum wage! I don't have a job (I am a student) and I do have other side-ventures that I'm working towards that look a bit more optimistic, so pardon me for rationally allocating my free time.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development - pool donations have been comparably low for a very long time, since before this development hiatus - so I don't think I'm being "punished" for not working hard enough or obviously enough. I don't think that most miners ever think about their donation amount again after setting it or pay attention to development. (I don't blame them for not dedicating their lives to tweaking P2Pool. ) But this is vicious downward cycle and anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite. It's simply a lack of foresightedness when miners decide to prioritize an amount of income that is invisible in the noise of variance of P2Pool payouts over the sustainability of P2Pool. Perhaps we'd be better off if I hadn't changed the mandatory 0.5% fee to an optional 0.5% donation (does anyone here even remember that?).

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).

Thank you Forrestv, i'll update the code at p2poolinfo.azurewebsites.net as soon as I get a chance. Appreciate getting it working.

Thanks for coming here and updating everyone, although not all will be satisfied with this. I fear the only thing that will silence the critics will be the release of some new p2pool code.
I'm glad some of my prodding has spark some more interest and follow with great interest.

I think we node operators should promise to turn on donations once we get some fixes through if not now. I'll be looking at my nodes and adding a donation back in also.

[gyverlb]

@ forrestv: What a sad, sad sob story.....I'm crying here.....really.....

If you can't be bothered to post updates (if any),

@cathoderay : pathetic. Actual crybabies calling people producing something crybabies.

So you don't have any progress reports meaningful to you on bitcointalk for one year? Maybe you should have registered before April 2014 ?

When forrestv started to work on p2pool he had 0 donation. Until it was fully working he worked for nothing. People coming here to reap the benefits without having contributed anything and complaining in the process are disgusting.

It seemed so uncalled for and unfair that I just donated 0.5BTC to forrestv. Keep whining cathoderay, you might just motivate others to do the same.

[IYFTech]

Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working

Wait - you agreed & wanted to take on p2pool.info did you not? Now you're saying you don't have the time or resources? It hasn't worked for the majority of the time you've had it anyway, despite you saying weeks ago you'd have it up "within a day or two". Personally I wish you hadn't taken it on, those "10 hours" of getting it back online would have been much better spent on doing something with p2pool instead. The only reason that you have got p2pool.info back up is to enable you to post here after so long - because you would have been shot to pieces had you posted this while p2pool.info was still down, and you know it.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development

You couldn't be more wrong - that's exactly the reason people have done it - plus trying to get any kind of response from you was impossible, so you can't blame them at all.

anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite.

Really? So according to your calculations 90% of p2pool users are hypocrites? It is interesting to note that the majority of users who suggest disabling donations are long-term users of p2pool - why do you think that is? Probably because they are the ones who have seen the development of p2pool as well as the involvement of it's dev in this here thread dwindle to zero over the last year. It is also the long-term users who have kept faith in p2pool which have stopped it from dying out completely - calling them hypocrites is not only unwise, it is also kicking them in the teeth.

Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool

Basically you're saying that unless everyone turns on donations again you won't do anything. The trouble with that is, users have been donating over the last year while you have done nothing. Then, out of the blue you post this & expect everyone to instantly give you donations again? That's bordering on bribery. I stopped donating to p2pool when development stopped & you went AWOL about 8 months ago, I see nothing in your post to change my mind & switch donations on again - quite the opposite in fact. I might not have used p2pool for as long as many other users have, but I have been using only p2pool for the entire time I have spent mining & have promoted it constantly up until you disappeared & p2pool became abandonware. When I see something happening to p2pool again I will switch donations on again - but not before. Calling me a hypocrite & blackmailing me will not change my mind either, in fact it puts me off even more.

Pull your head out of your arse, communicate with your users, discuss, talk & do something.

If you build it - they will come.

[gyverlb]

p2pool became abandonware.

Yeah right : https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool/commits/master

Maybe you should lookup the definition of the words you use.

And to sum your post : p2pool works for you (you wrote you used it exclusively for your mining) but you disabled donations anyway because there was no change in the code ? By the same twisted logic, you should have donated when you weren't mining and there was change.

[cathoderay]

It seemed so uncalled for and unfair that I just donated 0.5BTC to forrestv.

That's because you're a mug who fell for this sorry ass sob story  

Donate all you want - it's your money.

[gyverlb]

It seemed so uncalled for and unfair that I just donated 0.5BTC to forrestv.

That's because you're a mug who fell for this sorry ass sob story  

I'm also someone who could extend his company's business to cryptocurrency mining thanks to people like forrestv.

Donate all you want - it's your money.

Yep, almost exclusively earned by mining with p2pool.

[cathoderay]

I get it now.....you're in love. That's sweet.......

[jedimstr]

As jedimstr said, I did receive a sizable donation from the Litecoin foundation, and I have since been brainstorming and prototyping ways to fix the core problems with P2Pool - scalability and excessive variance for small miners. I prototyped a way to do trustless verification of blocks with O(1) storage so that we could free most P2Pool nodes from needing a local *coin node. I've spent a ton of time thinking of ways to implement parallel sharechains so that we can have shares more often, decreasing variance for small miners, while decreasing the strict latency requirements for hardware, sadly without any concrete results yet. Because this is a hard problem. I spent hundreds of hours in the summer of 2011 thinking about how P2Pool could possibly work, in a time before merged mining or pools with coinbase payouts even existed. Any further improvements that get us out of this local maxima that we're stuck in will require comparable amounts of thought. Some relief though - a few days ago, when people prodding renewed my eagerness, I may have made a breakthrough in ideas for how to get parallel sharechains to work (which I discussed in #p2pool).

Despite that, it is hard to work on this project when most people insist on cutting off the pool donations to me. When I see guides telling people to use --give-author 0 without any mention made of what it does, people blindly following them, or people asking me for help, providing screenshots of them running P2Pool with donations disabled, it hurts a bit. Actually, more than a bit. Right now, I get 0.09% of the revenue from P2Pool due to node donations (which default to 1%), which likely means that about 90% of people have completely disabled donations. That doesn't result in much revenue. Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working, which is the equivalent of two weeks of pool donations - if I were being paid minimum wage! I don't have a job (I am a student) and I do have other side-ventures that I'm working towards that look a bit more optimistic, so pardon me for rationally allocating my free time.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development - pool donations have been comparably low for a very long time, since before this development hiatus - so I don't think I'm being "punished" for not working hard enough or obviously enough. I don't think that most miners ever think about their donation amount again after setting it or pay attention to development. (I don't blame them for not dedicating their lives to tweaking P2Pool. ) But this is vicious downward cycle and anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite. It's simply a lack of foresightedness when miners decide to prioritize an amount of income that is invisible in the noise of variance of P2Pool payouts over the sustainability of P2Pool. Perhaps we'd be better off if I hadn't changed the mandatory 0.5% fee to an optional 0.5% donation (does anyone here even remember that?).

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).

Now if you chimed in with some of this info every once in awhile (even a one lined comment saying you're still working) maybe you wouldn't have seen so many complaints and reduction in the already miniscule donations settings.  It's not so much just lack of work that was pissing people off, it was the lack of communication.  Especially since your profile showed you were still reading the forums.  That makes people think you were abandoning this thing.

I for one will be bumping my node's donations back up above the minimum to 1%.  All you had to do was ask.   That also goes for asking for help.  There are other developers out there to bounce ideas and can do some of the lifting for you.  Innovation and breakthroughs are only a git pull away.

[jonnybravo0311]

@mdude77 - another 100k FSC sent to your donation address.  Tx ID: 8b3d8cb44cb98aa45c0e5bbf6b4f75338bc00fda377d8842b960ee3f43f4c13c

@forrestv - glad to see you posting to the thread again.  You stated that you've spent a lot of time thinking on how to implement some of your ideas, and may have had a breakthrough in how to reduce variance to the smaller miners.  I would love to see you spending time here bouncing those ideas off of people.  I think you'll find there are a number of people regularly posting in this thread that would be more than willing to help you solve some of the problems you're facing. I hope that you will use the community as a sounding board and remain active with us.

[bryonp]

OK everyone.... We need his help.....
BUT for now, WE NEED A BLOCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[minerpool-de]

Its a Misterium. Nobody will mining on P2pool in Germany. We have an 1A Node online at February 2014. The Node sleeping at 8 TH / s. I dont understand this

[IYFTech]

Its a Misterium. Nobody will mining on P2pool in Germany. We have an 1A Node online at February 2014. The Node sleeping at 8 TH / s. I dont understand this

It's not a mystery at all. There is very limited hardware that will work with p2pool, and the choice is getting smaller every week. SP10's are out of stock, S1's are finished, S2's don't work, S3's probably won't either when they are released, KNC's have run dry or not being delivered, Dragons don't work etc, etc.....the list is endless. Hardware that does work will soon be out of date & unprofitable to run like the S1's, Chilis,etc, etc.

All the nodes in the world won't make a blind bit of difference if there is no hardware that will work with it.

Why is this you ask? Read the posts above. Mystery solved.

The sooner someone forks p2pool from the donation demanding invisible-dev here, the sooner the community can start developing p2pool to make it compatible with all the available mining hardware.

[gyverlb]

The sooner someone forks p2pool from the donation demanding invisible-dev here, the sooner the community can start developing p2pool to make it compatible with all the available mining hardware.

Forking is only useful when the original dev doesn't develop and doesn't accept patches. Obviously you didn't bother to educate yourself on the current state of p2pool by reading the list of past year's commits.