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

[bitcoinbearhk]

As for the development of p2pool, what version should we use??? i have downloaded the versikn 13.4 from source, but i see some public nodes use strange versions.

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[PatMan]

As for the development of p2pool, what version should we use??? i have downloaded the versikn 13.4 from source, but i see some public nodes use strange versions.

For BTC mining the source from git is the correct one 

[PatMan]

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.

WHAT?!   

[bitcoinbearhk]

i've read from wiki that payment is to last n shares where n is the smaller of :
1. 3x the work needed to generate a block;
2. some 8640 shares (3 days)??

which ever is smaller......

so in practice each share can only live for something like 1.5 days only right can someone explain how situation 1 above works??? how did the system determins the average works needed to generate 3 blocks??? actual or predicted???

[pmorris]

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.

I wasn't clear what I meant perhaps. I agree there is no way p2pool (or bitcoin) would work on a closed source basis. It has to be open for large number of reasons.

My 'problem' with open source for p2pool, for want of a better word, is that developers cannot enforce users of the software to pay for the development effort. So free as in speech and not free as in beer. While lots and lots of opensource projects are done for the love of the craft I'm not sure how that would work for something like p2pool.

I guess you could say the same about Bitcoin as a whole. But there are ways for developers supporting the bitcoin network to get paid something for their effort.

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.

I wonder how much that is if you weight it by the bitcoin price at the time it was donated. Either way it's maybe not enough to expect someone with the necessary skill to put in the amount of effort required.

[PatMan]

I wonder how much that is if you weight it by the bitcoin price at the time it was donated.

That's completely irrelevant.

[pmorris]

I wonder how much that is if you weight it by the bitcoin price at the time it was donated.

That's completely irrelevant.

Why do you think that? People have to pay their bills in fiat. So if you're working out what someone 'earned' from their work doesn't the exchange rate to USD matter?

I don't know but I imagine that back in 2011 Forrest made p2pool not for the money. But I think the world has changed since then. A lot of the modern miners spending $1,000s on new asics, the makers of those asics and the commercial pools attracting them are doing it primarily for the money.

Wish I had a solution.

[murraypaul]

I wonder how much that is if you weight it by the bitcoin price at the time it was donated.

That's completely irrelevant.

It is only irrelevant if every bitcoin has been kept and still owned today.
If they've been spend, then their value is what is was when it was spent, almost certainly much less than today, for most of them.

[bitcoinbearhk]

My GetBlockTemplate Latency is about 0.35 second ... is that kinda slow?

Damnit got 6 shares , 3 were orphaned ....................... I am wondering ...

[rav3n_pl]

GBT like that should not be that bad. You have to be VERY unlucky to get 50% shares in 0.5 second window after new block...

[windpath]

In the chance this miner is on the thread, drop me a line....

[squashpile]

Dat spike.. same thing on mine yesterday. Fun with share diff north of 40000 huh? Everyone left but me.
lol

In other news.. my expected payout is very nice today. We need to hit some blocks!

In the chance this miner is on the thread, drop me a line....

[kgb2mining]

Wish I had a solution.

Personally, I don't think a solution is all that hard, it just requires a little press advocacy and some determination by a small handful of folks.  I also think that the ball has started rolling in that direction, thanks to windpath's efforts to date, and if momentum can be kept up and others pitch in to help out, it should be fine.  To that end, here's what my solution suggestion would be:

1) Get the project away from reliance on forrestv, which is already happening.  Again, nothing personal, but if he's not committed with or without donations, having it rest with one single person is detrimental, and as we have seen stunts growth horribly.
2) Re-work the p2pool project pages, sites, and get the important info updated - how to get it, how to set it up, where to go for answers, list of nodes and peers - need to be cleaned up and _maintained_ so that it's relevant.  This at least in part is happening, a-la windpath.
3) The hardest and probably most controversial - change the mindset of the pool from "open, 0%" to "proprietor-owned (note I didn't say proprietary, slight but important semantic difference) with minimal fee (1-1.5%)".

#3 I think is the answer to address the major problems facing the pool.  Open source and free will only take any project to a certain level, as long as people are willing to donate to foster a better cause.  I don't think this works in the BTC world, since we're all doing this for one reason - to mine BTC and make money, not to cure cancer or find alien life.

What's the biggest difference between proprietary pools and p2pool?  Proprietary pools have an entity (person, business, etc) behind them driving their pool to be better, because it attracts new miners and ultimately helps their bottom line.  That's the fundamental "problem" with p2pool - the ideology is great, but call a spade a spade in this case and admit the reality that without reward, you're not going to get a lot of people to do things to help beyond some forum posts.

I would suggest the only way to have this work is treat it like a true O.S. project - form a core group of members as caretakers of p2pool (you can easily see who could be a candidate by their actions).  Then change the code to remove the .5% donation to forrestv and replace with a 1% donation to an escrowed account overseen by the core group.  From this 1% amount, you could do 3 things that could ensure the ongoing health of p2pool - 1) form bounties for developers to tackle the coding of fixes big and small, 2) reward public pool node/peer operators for providing their time, services and resources maintaining high quality nodes that all miners can use and finally 3) re-distribute the leftover percentage directly to all the miners using the built-in reward/tip system already existing in p2pool.  This will provide a mechanism for properly funded development, and rewards to all who are doing their part to use p2pool and help it grow and flourish.

[IYFTech]

Forget it. Won't work. It must & will stay Open Source, like Bitcoin itself.

[pmorris]

I agree with everything you said KGB. But given its open source what stops someone from stripping out the mandatory fee and gaining the benefits without paying.

The share chain solution is that if the majority of p2pool are willing to play by these rules and reject freeloading shares that don't include the development fee then it would be enforced. That would be a hard fork so would need managing.

Will the majority of miners play ball though?

[windpath]

Wish I had a solution.

Personally, I don't think a solution is all that hard, it just requires a little press advocacy and some determination by a small handful of folks.  I also think that the ball has started rolling in that direction, thanks to windpath's efforts to date, and if momentum can be kept up and others pitch in to help out, it should be fine.  To that end, here's what my solution suggestion would be:

1) Get the project away from reliance on forrestv, which is already happening.  Again, nothing personal, but if he's not committed with or without donations, having it rest with one single person is detrimental, and as we have seen stunts growth horribly.
2) Re-work the p2pool project pages, sites, and get the important info updated - how to get it, how to set it up, where to go for answers, list of nodes and peers - need to be cleaned up and _maintained_ so that it's relevant.  This at least in part is happening, a-la windpath.
3) The hardest and probably most controversial - change the mindset of the pool from "open, 0%" to "proprietor-owned (note I didn't say proprietary, slight but important semantic difference) with minimal fee (1-1.5%)".

#3 I think is the answer to address the major problems facing the pool.  Open source and free will only take any project to a certain level, as long as people are willing to donate to foster a better cause.  I don't think this works in the BTC world, since we're all doing this for one reason - to mine BTC and make money, not to cure cancer or find alien life.

What's the biggest difference between proprietary pools and p2pool?  Proprietary pools have an entity (person, business, etc) behind them driving their pool to be better, because it attracts new miners and ultimately helps their bottom line.  That's the fundamental "problem" with p2pool - the ideology is great, but call a spade a spade in this case and admit the reality that without reward, you're not going to get a lot of people to do things to help beyond some forum posts.

I would suggest the only way to have this work is treat it like a true O.S. project - form a core group of members as caretakers of p2pool (you can easily see who could be a candidate by their actions).  Then change the code to remove the .5% donation to forrestv and replace with a 1% donation to an escrowed account overseen by the core group.  From this 1% amount, you could do 3 things that could ensure the ongoing health of p2pool - 1) form bounties for developers to tackle the coding of fixes big and small, 2) reward public pool node/peer operators for providing their time, services and resources maintaining high quality nodes that all miners can use and finally 3) re-distribute the leftover percentage directly to all the miners using the built-in reward/tip system already existing in p2pool.  This will provide a mechanism for properly funded development, and rewards to all who are doing their part to use p2pool and help it grow and flourish.

When we launch the front end on Github I have been considering forking the whole package.

I would love some feedback as to the suggestions made above.

I have been considering some other options to help raise funds for ongoing development.

Frankly, while my own desire for compensation is high, the benefits of being an open source and 0% fee pool are hard to ignore.

The primary Coin Cadence front-end that you see now on my site requires a lot of data that is simply not available to a regular p2pool node without some major changes that increase resources required by the server to the point where it would effect efficiency for most mining on their own nodes.

To solve this I will be providing an API that will allow nodes to pull the data they don't have access to from my servers.

To offset the costs of the API I was considering offering 2 options (miners choice):

1. Include paid ads in the data returned by the API. p2pool inherently attracts a highly targeted group of individuals that spend money on mining gear, it would be a manufacturers wet dream to "sponsor" the pool API with their message. If the front-end has a high adoption rate by you guys I believe this alone may raise enough to fund future development.

2. Pay a fee (annual?) to have an ad free version

None of this is set in stone, in fact I would love to hear feedback and other suggestions.

Once I've got p2pool.org re-launched and have released the beta of the front end on Github I plan to try and tackle the variance for small miners issue. It is not an easy problem to solve. I'm not sure if I will go the bounty route, or hire a full time python developer with some Bitcoin chops (if I can find one)... But for now focusing on the above.

[kgb2mining]

Forget it. Won't work. It must & will stay Open Source, like Bitcoin itself.

Please point out anywhere in my post where I said it should be closed source?  That is nowhere in the intent of my thoughts.

Removing it from being controlled by forrestv, yes.  That would be "forking it".  That does not mean we take the fork and close it up - that would probably be impossible if forrestv setup the licensing properly in the first place anyways.

[kgb2mining]

I agree with everything you said KGB. But given its open source what stops someone from stripping out the mandatory fee and gaining the benefits without paying.

The share chain solution is that if the majority of p2pool are willing to play by these rules and reject freeloading shares that don't include the development fee then it would be enforced. That would be a hard fork so would need managing.

Will the majority of miners play ball though?

I don't think there's anything stopping someone from re-coding it to remove the donation, however I'm not sure how the permissions are setup on the main git repo, whether those changes could be re-submitted back into the main branch without forrestv's approval.  That might require a fork.

Anyone is free to fork the code and make their own changes, but I'm sure also if someone did something like that with nefarious purposes it would be found out pretty quickly and that node could probably be blocked from interacting with the rest of the nodes.  Now I say that without knowing for sure, but that would be my guess.

[PatMan]

It certainly looks like you're saying you want to move it away from being Open Source, tbh:

Open source and free will only take any project to a certain level, as long as people are willing to donate to foster a better cause.  I don't think this works in the BTC world, since we're all doing this for one reason - to mine BTC and make money......

Personally, I got into Bitcoin because I believe that it has the potential to change the world & dismantle the corrupt Banking systems, & I'm happy if I break even or even make a loss if it succeeds in doing so. I want BTC to replace money, & I also know I'm not alone in believing it can. I'm totally not interested in getting rich, and if I were, mining BTC is not the way I'd go about it  

There is far more worth in BTC than making a quick profit. The long term potentials are limitless. World changing even.

[kgb2mining]

Frankly, while my own desire for compensation is high, the benefits of being an open source and 0% fee pool are hard to ignore.

Well, technically it's still a .5% fee pool if folks don't know how to turn off the donations part...

The primary Coin Cadence front-end that you see now on my site requires a lot of data that is simply not available to a regular p2pool node without some major changes that increase resources required by the server to the point where it would effect efficiency for most mining on their own nodes.

To solve this I will be providing an API that will allow nodes to pull the data they don't have access to from my servers.

I think this might tie into the idea behind my question yesterday about peering and "root peers".

Would it not make sense to see if there are others who would be willing to put up very well connected peer nodes, which won't service miners, but will provide peering and maybe the data and API system so that it can be queried by the local nodes?  I've got resources to be able to contribute and am willing, Paul seems to, and I'm sure there are others who will pitch in as has been the case to date.

It shouldn't be solely on you to be providing all of this, both because it's out of your pocket, and also a strain on your resources.  And, don't take this the wrong way, but we'd all be again relying on only one person for the fate of the project...