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

[murdof]

Created a guide for those that want to run their own p2pool today with today's Ubuntu (14.04 LTS) and today's code pulled from git.
Please let me know if you try it and find any issues:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=651819.new

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[flound1129]

Finding a active dev or two wouldn't do any harm either......

FTFY

To be fair though, both norgen and windpath have been doing some good stuff lately, but we need more to pick up the sizeable slack

What happened to the LTC that was given to forrestv to develop p2pool?

[jedimstr]

Finding a active dev or two wouldn't do any harm either......

FTFY

To be fair though, both norgen and windpath have been doing some good stuff lately, but we need more to pick up the sizeable slack

What happened to the LTC that was given to forrestv to develop p2pool?

You mean the donation drive/campaign/thread that Warren pushed? 
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=329860.0

You should ask him and the other LTC devs what happened with that. Or put it to forrestv here and/or a PM.  Good luck in getting a response and be sure to let us know what's up. 

[ujka]

Pool rate: 1.09PH/s
was ~470TH/s last time I checked (6 hours ago). ppl started switching?

[jacob019]

Pool rate: 1.09PH/s
was ~470TH/s last time I checked (6 hours ago). ppl started switching?

People are using p2pool as a backup pool.  Ghash stratum has been inaccessible to my miners all morning.

edit: Ghash back online, and as soon as it is my node loses 10 TH.  P2Pool is definitely being used as backup.

[jonnybravo0311]

Thoughts I've had on making p2pool more attractive to prospective node operators...

• An automated installer that would also install all merge-mineable coin wallets
• The installer would also include all dependencies and not require a user to go get X, Y or Z separately
• Automated payouts of merge-mined coins built into p2pool.  Unfortunately, the way the merge-mining works is that you are effectively solo-mining all your merged coins.
• A better default interface.  There are a number of great alternatives, but let's put a good face on the default one.
• Reduce the variance encountered with large swings of hashing speed

These are just musings I've had on how we can make p2pool more attractive to the average miner.  Let's face it, not everyone wants to deal with the hassle of getting this thing running in its current state.  Offer a nice, clean installer interface to them and they're far more likely to go with it.  This is the advantage of the big pools: they have an easy-to-use interface and offer up a set-it-and-forget-it kind of experience.  I'll use GHash.io as an example.  You sign up for it, create a worker, point your miner to the pool and you're done.  Automatically you're earning BTC, NMC, IXC, and DVC.  You can then use your mined coins to purchase even more hashing power, or you can send the coins to your offline wallets, or to an exchange.  You get a good set of stats, a relatively clean interface, and the bonus functionality of a hashing exchange.

Compare that with p2pool.  First you need to decide whether to take the plunge and setup your own node, or you need to find one that's close to you - and stable.  No need to point your miners to a node that's going to be up and down all the time.  Let's assume you took the plunge and decided to setup your own node.  Ok, go get a bunch of dependencies (Python, Twisted, Zope, etc) and install them.  Oh, you want to merge-mine, too?  Go get all of those wallets, or maybe you need to compile them from source.  More dependencies.  Maybe now you can finally start it up.  Maybe you got frustrated, or didn't want to bother with the hassle, so you decided to mine on somebody else's node.  You did some research, found a node you like and pointed your miner there.  Wait, why does this node's interface look so different than that other guy's?  Why do the stats captured here seem different than the ones over there?  Why is there no consistency?

Finally, there's the issue of variance.  Your average miner simply doesn't want to accept that he might go days without finding a share.  He sees his miners plugged in.  He sees them hashing.  Why isn't he earning?  On this point, I'm not sure what can be done to solve it.  Dynamically adjust the share time along with the difficulty?  Adjust the weighting of found shares based upon calculated miner hash rate?  I believe that the issue of variance is p2pool's fatal flaw.  Let's assume that EVERY miner everywhere suddenly had an epiphany and decided to join p2pool.  Yay!  We suddenly have 100PH/s!  Uh-oh.... share difficulty has shot up to a billion...

OK... ramblings over for now.  It's too nice a day out to sit here posting

[jacob019]

Finally, there's the issue of variance.  Your average miner simply doesn't want to accept that he might go days without finding a share.  He sees his miners plugged in.  He sees them hashing.  Why isn't he earning?  On this point, I'm not sure what can be done to solve it.  Dynamically adjust the share time along with the difficulty?  Adjust the weighting of found shares based upon calculated miner hash rate?  I believe that the issue of variance is p2pool's fatal flaw.  Let's assume that EVERY miner everywhere suddenly had an epiphany and decided to join p2pool.  Yay!  We suddenly have 100PH/s!  Uh-oh.... share difficulty has shot up to a billion...

If p2pool had 100 PH/s, we would see proxy pools popping up.  P2Pool could serve as a backend network between pool operators and small miners could mine on a wide variety of small pools like back in the old day.  Once competition started heating up, proxy pool operators could offer merged mining with a setup similar to Eligius.  It would be nice if we could merge mine on a separate share chain though.

[Hawkix]

There can be more than one P2Pool. Or P2Pools could be tiered into hierarchy - see this idea https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=648138.msg7309185#msg7309185

[jonnybravo0311]

There can be more than one P2Pool. Or P2Pools could be tiered into hierarchy - see this idea https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=648138.msg7309185#msg7309185

Cool idea.  Multiple tiers.  I like it.

[jacob019]

Vertcoin has three p2pools for different sized miners.

[jedimstr]

3 days without a block...
Even knocking the doorstep of 1PH (back down to 609Th as of this post)and passing 1% of the network, we're still stuck in this dry spell.  

Did someone forget to stick a Satoshi in Lady Luck's garter belt again?  

All these small donation payments are nice and all, but it's long past time for another block. C'mon, Lady Luck, it's time to make it rain.

[jonnybravo0311]

Hey mdude77... another donation of 150000 FSC to your address.  Tx ID: 87eb71c8ca0b577d230e4fef75dd21ee22ac96b5622626a8159c07a0cb4fc04c

[jdot007]

3 days without a block...
Even knocking the doorstep of 1PH (back down to 609Th as of this post)and passing 1% of the network, we're still stuck in this dry spell.  

Did someone forget to stick a Satoshi in Lady Luck's garter belt again?  

All these small donation payments are nice and all, but it's long past time for another block. C'mon, Lady Luck, it's time to make it rain.

Makes me wonder if we're being block withheld same as the situation with Eligius. Does anyone know if this is possible given P2Pools structure?

J

[jacob019]

3 days without a block...
Even knocking the doorstep of 1PH (back down to 609Th as of this post)and passing 1% of the network, we're still stuck in this dry spell.  

Did someone forget to stick a Satoshi in Lady Luck's garter belt again?  

All these small donation payments are nice and all, but it's long past time for another block. C'mon, Lady Luck, it's time to make it rain.

Makes me wonder if we're being block withheld same as the situation with Eligius. Does anyone know if this is possible given P2Pools structure?

J

It's pretty normal for p2pool to have dry spells, we have such a low percentage of the network hash.  I can't see why someone would bother to attack p2pool.  It's certainly possible for any pool to be attacked, it's at the core nature of pooled mining.

[murdof]

I updated the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS guide with precompiled binaries for the merged coins in order to speed up installation.
Of course I still have the instructions if someone wants to compile the files instead.

[iglasses]

P2Pool can blow me after working all day in the hot sun on a day I got up late and didn't time to shower because I was up all night sticking it in the wife's ass.

I don't even mine on ghash, I'm a guild guy, but I tried to be a good bitizen and ran a full node p2pool with 2+Ths for three days and I couldn't buy a fucking can of soda with what it generated.

[PatMan]

Luck can be a bummer sometimes eh? At least your wife is happy 

[windpath]

Luck can be a bummer sometimes eh? At least your wife is happy 

Haha!

[Hunterbunter]

Thoughts I've had on making p2pool more attractive to prospective node operators...

• Automated payouts of merge-mined coins built into p2pool.  Unfortunately, the way the merge-mining works is that you are effectively solo-mining all your merged coins.

Finally, there's the issue of variance.  Your average miner simply doesn't want to accept that he might go days without finding a share.  He sees his miners plugged in.  He sees them hashing.  Why isn't he earning?  On this point, I'm not sure what can be done to solve it.  Dynamically adjust the share time along with the difficulty?  Adjust the weighting of found shares based upon calculated miner hash rate?  I believe that the issue of variance is p2pool's fatal flaw.  Let's assume that EVERY miner everywhere suddenly had an epiphany and decided to join p2pool.  Yay!  We suddenly have 100PH/s!  Uh-oh.... share difficulty has shot up to a billion...

I've written a p2pool merged coin payout tool which tries to help with paying out merged coins, but I'll admit it's of limited value. That's mainly because of a few things out of my control:

https://github.com/hunterbunter/p2pool-merged-payout-tool

Currently it takes the server balance of all the merged mined coins, takes a record of the hashpower for the previous month (can be hour/day/week/month/year) from p2pool, then works out the market value of each coin in btc, and calculates what each should get. It shows two payout tables, one if you want to pay out in a particular convenient coin (everyone gets one type of coin), and the other if you do a native payout (everyone gets a bit of every coin). It still requires manual processing, though, but if you can get everyone's payout addresses in a database, it's fairly easy to make payouts automated too.

Regarding the issue of variance, and especially the share-chain difficulty, I agree it's a crippling issue, but no more than the original bitcoin blockchain itself - at 100% p2pool, it becomes a case of every node acting like a minipool going for a block reward, except they can get a portion of a block rather than all or nothing....still better imo.

Within this environment, we can then choose automatic bitcoin payments from p2pool, where each miner takes the risk, or we can choose a middleman, who takes on the risk for profit. With automatic payments you don't have to trust a node that much, but you still take on the risk of variance yourself. A node operator can set up a hybrid node which offers other services, but charges a 100% pool fee (they control the coins, meaning trust issues). They could still charge an 'effective' 0% fee by distributing all funds received, though...it's just about processing.

A very simple hybrid pool would register all the different addresses people want a payout in, then either pay them out automatically or setup a login system where people can pay out at whim. I set up blisterpool to do the former - people register a bitcoin address and devcoin address pair which was locked in the db - it automatically pays out merged coins plus a bonus in devcoins when a block is found (incentive for testing the unofficial devcoin client, not particularly p2pool related). It's all a lot more work than a few install commands, though, but the option is there for people. I'm considering making it a 100% fee pool (0% effective) and adding this login system with services similar to GHash.io, just to see if it has any value to miners.

The big advantage of p2pool as a backend in this case, is that it allows new, small hybrid pool operators the chance of attracting people based on p2pool's hashing power, instead of trying to solo-mine a bitcoin block itself. P2Pool is still a good thing!

[Hunterbunter]

Does anyone know of a way to capture the password input a miner uses? I'm wondering if it's possible for miners to differentiate workers this way.