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

[IYFTech]

5. The nodes will pay 0.5% of returns to Forrest, the developer of p2pool, to ensure he can continue to support and develop the software we rely on.

But....but.....

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[squashpile]

Good grief..ouch lol

New work for worker! Difficulty: 38074.924626

[kgb2mining]

5. The nodes will pay 0.5% of returns to Forrest, the developer of p2pool, to ensure he can continue to support and develop the software we rely on.

But....but.....

Yep, it sounded great until I got to #5, and then to #7.

Sorry Paul, but I predict you're going to get very low adoption on your node if you're taking 1% total fees - that's the main reason most folks mine p2pool... the thought of the decentralization is wonderful and dear to most of our hearts, but cold hard BTC is the driving factor in many people's minds.  I'm sure some folks will use it, it will be better than their other options, but at least here in NJ there are many alternatives with 0% fees.

And, I hate to break it to you, but forrestv is most likely not going to contribute enough at this point, even with the donations re-instated.  I mean no personal knock on him, but given his situation even with his best intentions he hasn't shown the time lately to be around and continually contribute.  I'll not start another long thread about it, but I would make a suggestion - instead of the flat donation, it might be better to form a bounty-type reward system which might yield better results, might not, and might entice users to use your node(s) more also, deciding whether they want to contribute or not.

[pmorris]

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.

Agree that a 1% total fee is something for people to think about. Especially when there are 0% nodes around.

The goal is that a high quality service would offset the costs by producing a superior return. Doesn't take much downtime or orphan shares to 'cost' 1% of your income. Of course my nodes are pretty new so there's no track record of that superior return of course to be fair 

In the overall picture of how volatile the mining business is (given diff changes, new asics, power costs, USD/BTC exchange rate) in a way a fixed 1% is relatively small to the overall risk/returns. I guess I'm hoping that there may be some miners out there who are willing to pay a moderate fee for a reliable good quality service. Maybe mining is too hard nosed for that though.

You've got a good point about development funding. Although, if nobody makes donations to pay for p2pool development then will it continue to exist? Then we're left with the commercial pools using proprietary software and charging 3% fees with all the centralization and other issues that go with it. Tragedy of the commons I guess.

If there really is no significant movement in p2pool development for a few months then I imagine the community will just end up cutting donations to zero (if they're not there already) and hope that someone steps in to maintain the code.

Let's see what happens anyway. If I can attract some hashrate to profile it I'd be interested to know if efficiency/returns are better than other 0% pools. If not then I guess we'll see.

Would love to know what other miners think. Will you only consider using a 0% pool?

[kgb2mining]

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.

Good that you took the comments well, I wasn't meaning to be mean or anything, just opinions... sometimes folks get defensive and I didn't want to seem attacking

Agree that a 1% total fee is something for people to think about. Especially when there are 0% nodes around.

The goal is that a high quality service would offset the costs by producing a superior return. Doesn't take much downtime or orphan shares to 'cost' 1% of your income. Of course my nodes are pretty new so there's no track record of that superior return of course to be fair 

In the overall picture of how volatile the mining business is (given diff changes, new asics, power costs, USD/BTC exchange rate) in a way a fixed 1% is relatively small to the overall risk/returns. I guess I'm hoping that there may be some miners out there who are willing to pay a moderate fee for a reliable good quality service. Maybe mining is too hard nosed for that though.

Understandable.  I'm sure there would be some that will use it, and surely I do understand that someone's gotta pay the bills at some level for the hardware, bandwith, etc and it's not totally unreasonable to want to try to cover at least some of that for providing the service.  I think there's a lot of folks with bad tastes in their mouths from some of the proprietary pools that charge a bit and may be biased against it at all costs.

You've got a good point about development funding. Although, if nobody makes donations to pay for p2pool development then will it continue to exist? Then we're left with the commercial pools using proprietary software and charging 3% fees with all the centralization and other issues that go with it. Tragedy of the commons I guess.

If there really is no significant movement in p2pool development for a few months then I imagine the community will just end up cutting donations to zero (if they're not there already) and hope that someone steps in to maintain the code.

We're pretty much at that point already - most operators have disabled all donations, and there's a partial vicious circle that's spawned from it (although I personally think the ship was sailing in this direction before donations started disappearing)

If you go back about 50-60 pages or so you'll get into the meat of the answer to most of your questions.  There was quite a bit of discussion about/with forrestv when he initially went MIA, then came back briefly with a response that some took not too well (and honestly, I understand his response and why it came out the way it did, but it could have come across a little better IMHO). 

To briefly summarize, I believe he is a student, started writing the code to a good result where we are now, but then wasn't getting too many donations, and re-prioritized his time to be less of p2pool since there was no "reward" for it anymore.  He's been spotted making an occasional checkin to the git repo, but nothing of major substance, and development has stalled.  He was even offered a bounty to fix a few things about 2-3 months ago, but was never heard from and the bounty went unclaimed and returned to the donators.  So, at this point I'd consider the code almost "orphaned", with no clear direction or driver pushing to get things done.

Let's see what happens anyway. If I can attract some hashrate to profile it I'd be interested to know if efficiency/returns are better than other 0% pools. If not then I guess we'll see.

I'd be interested to see as well if anything in your config makes it better.  The gold standard to compare to right now I believe would be CoinCadence (windpath's node).  His node seems to be well connected and well resourced as well, so it's probably a closer comparison.  I'd also be happy to compare my stats with yours as well - our local node is a 16-core, 36GB RAM physical box on a 50Mbit backbone.  The only difference is that we're behind a firewall and don't have any incoming peer connections allowed.  If you read back this page or last you'll see my question about peering, which I think is along the lines of your thinking - better peers, faster shares in, etc.

Would love to know what other miners think. Will you only consider using a 0% pool?

Me personally I now run my own node, because I thankfully have the resources to do so.  I was on BTCGuild paying 2% before switching to p2pool (went to coincadence first, then built my own node), so quite honestly .5% was less than what I was getting dinged for so it would have been fine if that was the case.  I just personally think it'll be a hard hump to get over since most are already used to seeing 0% nodes.

[bacek]

Need some advice from someone mining BTC using AntMiner S3 and connecting to a local instance of p2pool. It appears that I've got everything configured properly and I've been mining for the last 32+ hours but haven't gotten a single share yet. Is this expected?

My p2pool stats:

Code:

Version: 13.4

Pool rate: 2.39PH/s (17% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 10000000

Node uptime: 1.4 days Peers: 6 out, 8 in

Local rate: 420GH/s (3.5% DOA) Expected time to share: 1.2 days

Shares: 0 total (0 orphaned, 0 dead) Efficiency: ???

These are the most recent values - the Local rate varies between 400-500GH/s and the DOA rate is anywhere between 0-4%.

The miner is configured with <wallet_id>/256+256 as the username to ensure static difficulty.

[windpath]

Need some advice from someone mining BTC using AntMiner S3 and connecting to a local instance of p2pool. It appears that I've got everything configured properly and I've been mining for the last 32+ hours but haven't gotten a single share yet. Is this expected?

My p2pool stats:

Code:

Version: 13.4

Pool rate: 2.39PH/s (17% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 10000000

Node uptime: 1.4 days Peers: 6 out, 8 in

Local rate: 420GH/s (3.5% DOA) Expected time to share: 1.2 days

Shares: 0 total (0 orphaned, 0 dead) Efficiency: ???

These are the most recent values - the Local rate varies between 400-500GH/s and the DOA rate is anywhere between 0-4%.

The miner is configured with <wallet_id>/256+256 as the username to ensure static difficulty.

Looks like a run of OK luck so far, I would not call it bad luck for at least another day.

All I can say about luck is that it is bound to change, and patience is of utmost importance with p2pool...

I have been very happy with 8 S3s on a Coin Cadence testing node (local), I'll provide the test node stats in default front-end format:

[bacek]

@windpath, thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it. I guess I'll let it run for another day to see if anything changes. Just wanted to confirm that this is expected behavior.

[windpath]

@windpath, thanks for taking the time to respond, I appreciate it. I guess I'll let it run for another day to see if anything changes. Just wanted to confirm that this is expected behavior.

Your welcome, happy to contribute.

p2pool has been very kind to me.

I've been actively mining on the pool since around January, and I have to say that if you stick with it, it pays off.

The PPLNS system with a ~3 day share window has been brutal at times of bad luck, but since I began mining has always paid out in the end over time.

While the minimum hash rate to receive a regular payout has been increasing, if you can keep a share or 3 in the chain it has been absolutely worth it...

Just my 0.02BTC

[Duce]

windpath are you using a static difficulty setting as well?

[windpath]

windpath are you using a static difficulty setting as well?

For this particular test (stats above) I am not, just a raw address.

The frequency configuration varies based on the Ants performance but have not seen a big difference when setting sudo share difficulty , other then the graphs leveling out.

While real p2pool diff is around 10MM, the pool assigned difficulty right now for the S3 is ~795, no point in trying to configure that, I let p2pool set it...

[Duce]

windpath are you using a static difficulty setting as well?

For this particular test (stats above) I am not, just a raw address.

The frequency configuration varies based on the Ants performance but have not seen a big difference when setting sudo share difficulty , other then the graphs leveling out.

While real p2pool diff is around 10MM, the pool assigned difficulty right now for the S3 is ~795, no point in trying to configure that, I let p2pool set it...

Good to hear as I am following the same train of thought, thanks.

[bryonp]

Hey guys, just curious,
my node says this
Version: unknown 7032706f6f6c2d6e2d6d6173746572
but I see most say Version 13?

Am I running the wrong version?

[squashpile]

bitcoinbearhk how is it going? Got an update on that 5 Th/s? I have had a good day. Defaults on s3's. I'm done messing with it. It works.

[bitcoinbearhk]

Not so lucky with the 5Th/s (12 Ant S3s) setting ......

Mined around 15 hours after I restarted the node ... 6 shares (2 ophened ...)  Furthermore, 2 of the "good share" appeared to be mined by my Cointerras when they hop between the pools during fail-over...

So ... I am experiencing similar problem, where the Ants are not getting in shares as they should be .... it's like 3 times less effective than it should be.....

I have temporary shut my node down, and mine with Discuss Fish for the time being, before I get off work and carry out further trials tonight.



BTW, I set the followings
(i) --give-author 0 -a [a remote payout address]
(ii) Ants mining using separate names (e.g. Ant1, Ant2, Ant3 ... Ant12)
(iii) the node and the miners are in 2 separate physical location, but not too far away (20 min ride distance)

Will these seriously affect the mining performance?  I know (iii) will hurt a bit, but how about (i) and (ii) ?

[pmorris]

We're pretty much at that point already - most operators have disabled all donations, and there's a partial vicious circle that's spawned from it (although I personally think the ship was sailing in this direction before donations started disappearing)

Yeah, I read some of that. I saw the rate of development had tailed off and the issues with some mining hardware. Hadn't realised how much of an issue that was though. Will be interesting to see how the p2pool community deals with the lack of development. Would be a huge shame if it collapses.

Actually I was really tempted to try to reimplement some of p2pool in a systems language like go. Both as a bit of a fun project and also to learn the protocol. I couldn't find any documentation on the protocol beyond the python source though and it doesn't look the easiest to follow.

Me personally I now run my own node, because I thankfully have the resources to do so.  I was on BTCGuild paying 2% before switching to p2pool (went to coincadence first, then built my own node), so quite honestly .5% was less than what I was getting dinged for so it would have been fine if that was the case.  I just personally think it'll be a hard hump to get over since most are already used to seeing 0% nodes.

Windpath very graciously sent me a PM to advise that I was actually paying Forrestv 0.005% by accident instead of 0.5%. I need to see the config file to work out how I messed that up! But as it turns out it was a nil donation anyway - sorry about that

I think that for some people there isn't a net benefit to running a proper node. If they are running one at home then are probably hidden costs like less efficient mining and orphan shares which add up. For instance having ISP QOS filtering and firewalls or random middle of the night network maintenance downtime etc etc. Not to mention the potential security risks of opening up a home computer to the wider internet. You wouldn't believe how many Chinese hackers try to hack these servers every hour when I look at the firewall logs - scary stuff.

Where people give the service away for 0% fee like coincadence then that's going to be pretty hard to beat competitively but there will only be so many miners that can connect to that before the amount of money he's giving away will make it untenable. Good advertising for the excellent price ticker service though and a good way to support the community so I'm all for it.

In competitive spirit, seeing as the hashrate on my node is currently 0, I can offer a highly competitive fee reduction to 0.55% (by stiffing forrestv). I don't even have to change the config file!!

When I get a chance later today I'll set it to 0%. It's not really about the money so I'm happy to run the nodes for several months without any income.  I don't like the way things are going with GHash etc and without p2pool being a credible alternative for larger miners it will die out.

It would be great to get some evidence that a stable and well connected node can pay for itself in improved mining revenue over a homebrew solution.

Cheers
Paul

[cathoderay]

The fact that the OP header still says 600TH pretty much sums the situation up I'm afraid........

[pmorris]

Hard to see a good solution if it's to be open source too. Any attempt by a developer to gain a reward for their efforts can be undone with a quick hack.

Solutions that require altruism from miners are possibly doomed to fail?

Equally I can't see why a talented coder would work hard to support a system making everyone else money except him.

[Lucky Cris]

I don't think this is entirely true... Depends on the circumstances.

Nope.. that message is fine. No issues.

I have got a lot of this message on my node:

Punishing share for "Block-stale detected .......

Does this mean anything bad?

[cathoderay]

Hard to see a good solution if it's to be open source too. Any attempt by a developer to gain a reward for their efforts can be undone with a quick hack.

Solutions that require altruism from miners are possibly doomed to fail?

Equally I can't see why a talented coder would work hard to support a system making everyone else money except him.

Sorry, but that statement is completely false. I suggest you re-read the entire history of the situation first before posting that kind of stuff....& you obviously don't understand what Open Source is, what it offers, what it represents, how it works or what it stands for.

As for the "making money" thing:

These are forrestv's addresses that he gets donations to:

https://blockchain.info/address/1Kz5QaUPDtKrj5SqW5tFkn7WZh8LmQaQi4 Total Received 210.78862928 BTC
https://blockchain.info/address/1J1zegkNSbwX4smvTdoHSanUfwvXFeuV23 Total Received 36.7754832 BTC
http://ltc.blockr.io/address/info/LeD2fnnDJYZuyt8zgDsZ2oBGmuVcxGKCLd Total received 1,709.79411620 LTC

..as of 21st June - you can click the addresses to see the latest balances.

Suggesting it be closed source would be suicide - just ridiculous....