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

[kgb2mining]

What configuration do I need to setup a node?

Edit: Anyone wants to help me setup an Iceland node?

At minimum: VM with 2 CPU, 4GB RAM, and 120GB disk space, running either Linux (Ubuntu is the preferred, easiest) or Windows server (ugh, but that's just me )

At best: physical node with the above stats but with either a decent non-ssd RAID-1 or RAID-10 disk array, or a good RAID-1 SSD array for the blockchain, as your latencies will result heavily on your disk speed to be able to process the blockchain transactions.  (and I suggest RAID mainly to prevent downtime if the disk dies and you have to re-setup or re-download the blockchain, which would mean your node is offline for ~2 days during that time)

There's a good thread on setup on Ubuntu with a really good one-step setup script that I used for my first node setup.  Found it - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=651819.0

If you can get a basic machine up running Linux and provide remote SSH access, I would be willing to help out.

Oh, and regardless of your node, the suggestion is to run your wallet on a completely separate machine and direct all payouts there, to prevent any hacking or server crash issues.

PS - Welcome!

[RoadStress]

If you can get a basic machine up running Linux and provide remote SSH access, I would be willing to help out.

Oh, and regardless of your node, the suggestion is to run your wallet on a completely separate machine and direct all payouts there, to prevent any hacking or server crash issues.

PS - Welcome!

As soon as I find a VPS provider in iceland who isn't retard like Edis I will let you know. Apparently for Edis bitcoin mining and mining server(pool) is the same thing. http://wiki.edis.at/faq:termsofservice#banned_applications

Regarding the wallet. Does the pool needs a separate wallet or what are you talking about? Aren't the revenues sent directly to the workers addresses?

[mdude77]

Looks like the new Tube miners can be added to the "not compatible" list of miners.......

Basic question but do we know why some hardware isn't working well with p2pool?

I assume the hardware is driven by the same mining software like cgminer? Which is using the same protocols to talk to p2pool (stratum?) as GHash.

So is it something to do with polling frequency / latency that is p2pools fault or what?

From what I've observed with my S2, it's not capable of restarting work every 30 seconds like p2pool requires.

M

I'll second that thought.  It's the 30-second work restart that is the problem.  Along with trying to figure out a way to better deal with the larger per-share diff for small miners, this has been one of the largest issues needing to be fixed.  However, I'm not sure where the solution lies if it's on the p2pool side, or more on the manufacturers/hardware.  Someone who's been around longer might have a more accurate explanation.

Fault lies on both sides.  The design of p2pool requires that the restart period be pretty brief.  Remember the restart is issued when a share is found on the alt chain, and the target is finding a share every 30 seconds.  To make that period longer means the difficulty has to be higher.  Want 60 seconds?  Think 24million share difficulty.

(I think there's something wrong with this math ... because if you scale it up to 10 minutes, the BTC block time, you should get the BTC difficulty.)

The ASIC manufacturers have no incentive to make their hardware compatible with p2pool, because it's a niche pool.  All they care is that it works with the main pools.

M

[IYFTech]

From what I've observed with my S2, it's not capable of restarting work every 30 seconds like p2pool requires.

M

I actually run an S2 on p2pool - I've spent literally days tinkering around with the settings and found that the best settings for my setup was to use --queue 0 --failover-only mildly OC'd to 212 which gives me ~950Gh/s compared with ~1100Gh/s at a centralized pool.  It's not the best & a bit of a power draw, but I'm happy pointing it at my p2pool node with the rest of my miners 

Oh for a decent firmware update......

[RoadStress]

Someone please share some European nodes.

Edit: Is it me or none of the Europe nodes are alive?

[mdude77]

Someone please share some European nodes.

Edit: Is it me or none of the Europe nodes are alive?

http://p2pool-nodes.info/

M

[windpath]

Someone please share some European nodes.

Edit: Is it me or none of the Europe nodes are alive?

Best live source for nodes I've located:

http://p2pool-nodes.info/

Edit: M beat me to it

[RoadStress]

Thank you both!

Maybe add the page to the p2pool official page?

[xyzzy099]

Thank you both!

Maybe add the page to the p2pool official page?

I always had trouble with the p2pool.info site, in that my node showed up there for a while, then later just went away from no particular reason I could ascertain.  I have seen similar complaints from others also.

I think this one is more accurate and inclusive:

http://p2pools.org/btc

[windpath]

Thank you both!

Maybe add the page to the p2pool official page?

I always had trouble with the p2pool.info site, in that my node showed up there for a while, then later just went away from no particular reason I could ascertain.  I have seen similar complaints from others also.

I think this one is more accurate and inclusive:

http://p2pools.org/btc

I ~believe~ the difference is you have to submit your node to p2pools.org, whereas p2pool-nodes.info grabs nodes from the network every ~30 mins?

I'm happy to report we will soon have a central resource for all this stuff

Sneak peak:

[EErik]

but hey guys what's going on? in the last 20 days p2p lost about 70 out of 250 active users / addesses (although the hashrate scores 1ph more), share diff of the pool is very high for those who do not have a farm, I personally with 3 th / s i have not done a good share in the last 20 hours ... there is no way of remodulating the share diff of p2p so that it is not so difficult for small-scale miners have a decent payout and a little more stable? ok accept the variance I can tolerate, but it seems clear that many users they are leaving the pool

E

My opinion is that a lot of the smaller miners are getting out of the game completely with difficulty rising and bitcoin prices falling or stagnant.  Also a lot of older hardware is dropping out, sometimes being replaced by smaller numbers of better equipment (remember miners means addresses, not people - I've got 5 different mining addresses running for just myself).  P2pool is seeing more of that because of the low usage rate to begin with.  I think the barrier to entry these days is at minimum an S1, more likely an S3, 400GH/s to get anything worth of a payout.

However, with 3TH/s you should be seeing more shares than that, at least one every 3-4 hours on average I would think.  Could be just variance - how long have you been up and running?  Typically when you first start with p2pool you should let it settle in for at least 3 days, more likely about a week before things start evening out and get more consistent.  I remember when I first switched over to p2pool it was very slow in the first few days even on 7TH/s, then by the next week we were doing well.

The pool was just a week old, I waited to have at least 3 incoming connection and then I moved my miner from another p2p where I had parked for 2 days. Only yesterday I moved to another pool for 12 hours. You can see what happened this week here http://2.234.55.84:9332/static/graphs.html?Week

And amazingly after 24 hours of mining without seeing a share I have taken 3, one behind the other. :-)

The thing that scares me a bit is in the last two month the "share diff" is rising a lot, and we are cutting out all the little miner. today share diff have touched 14200000.

If it takes me four hours to share with 3th/s for those who has 1 th/s in over 3 days they should wait 6 shares only, and in this condition you are at the mercy of the variance. At the same time for those who have a farm of 20th/s or more they will have near-constant reward and they can even allowed to hop to other pool for some times.

it would be great if the shares diff go 1000 times lower (and the reward to find a share 1000 times lower too), in this way could also mine those who have much less hashrate, how can they do for now only in the other pool. P2pool would be much more distributed and more people participate, which is for the benefit of all I think.

E

[bryonp]

but hey guys what's going on? in the last 20 days p2p lost about 70 out of 250 active users / addesses (although the hashrate scores 1ph more), share diff of the pool is very high for those who do not have a farm, I personally with 3 th / s i have not done a good share in the last 20 hours ... there is no way of remodulating the share diff of p2p so that it is not so difficult for small-scale miners have a decent payout and a little more stable? ok accept the variance I can tolerate, but it seems clear that many users they are leaving the pool

E

All I can tell you is that I am pumping out 4TH and a few months ago I was getting around 100.oo a day give or take a few good days and a few bad days...BUT - now I am lucky to get 10.oo to 12.oo per block and with 2 to 4 per day I am making no money and my electric is way over 1000.00 per month.
I am just about to give up on p2pool and see what happens else where........ Its just not doing it for me these days?
Any thoughts from anyone is welcome .........
I love it here but I am just at a point of killing myself!
I hate to stop but its about that level I think....
Dont want to put another 5000.00 into machines to just break even in 3 months.....

[coinme.info]

My node running Matt's fork with the embedded python-based relay code has been up for almost 24 hours now.  Initial reports seem that it's doing very well in general - over 110% efficiency for long periods, currently at 115%.  19 shares so far, all good - 0/0 orph/dead.

So, at the very least it's not hurting it at all, and hopefully is helping.  Will need to run longer to see how the share rates and efficiency do... I seem to see that as it goes along, getting past the 40 share mark is when I start seeing orphans/dead pop up.

On a side note tho - anyone seeing their DOA rates climb higher over the past week or so?  I was happily running around 3-4% DOA for the longest time but now I'm seeing it in the 6-8% range quite a lot.  Still better than the pool average, but I'm wondering if there's a core reason for the rates rising.  (and yes I've changed my S3's down from the default queue 4096, and I've tried 0 and 1 with neither being any majorly different).

Similar results to you using Matt's fork and the embedded python-based relay since I got this going on Windows Server 2012 R2 with an update from Matt.

Version: unknown 7032706f6f6c2d6d6173746572
Pool rate: 3.00PH/s (13% DOA+orphan) Share difficulty: 12700000
Node uptime: 14.9 hours Peers: 6 out, 3 in
Local rate: 2.38TH/s (3.6% DOA) Expected time to share: 6.4 hours
Shares: 2 total (0 orphaned, 0 dead) Efficiency: 115.0%

Not seeing the increase in DOA yet but I've probably jinxed it now so time will tell.

GBT latency is the big issue for me as I'm 12,000+km of fiber away from Matt's US-West node which I'm using as it was 100ms faster than the AU node.
This is normal as any US-West servers are normally lower latency than Asia nodes due to network topology.

Currently GBT is between 0.2 - 0.4 so I'm happy with that and the low DOA and normal shares being found seems to support that things are running ok.

This on 7200 RPM Sata as the SSD died.

[kgb2mining]

If you can get a basic machine up running Linux and provide remote SSH access, I would be willing to help out.

Oh, and regardless of your node, the suggestion is to run your wallet on a completely separate machine and direct all payouts there, to prevent any hacking or server crash issues.

PS - Welcome!

As soon as I find a VPS provider in iceland who isn't retard like Edis I will let you know. Apparently for Edis bitcoin mining and mining server(pool) is the same thing. http://wiki.edis.at/faq:termsofservice#banned_applications

Regarding the wallet. Does the pool needs a separate wallet or what are you talking about? Aren't the revenues sent directly to the workers addresses?

Sorry, ran out for a few hours and didn't reply to this.

Yes, P2Pool is different than most other pools in that your miner is configured with your actual BTC payment address as the worker name.  So, whenever a block is found and that address has at least one share in the chain, you get a direct payment to that address.  You can have one or all of your miners use the same worker BTC address, and yes, that address will carry across pools so if you mine on one node then fail over to another, your work will continue there on the same address rather than stopping and restarting.

When you build a node, it comes with it's own wallet (since you're running a full bitcoind instance) and default payment address.  You could use that address to receive payments on if you wanted to and had no other wallet address anywhere else.  However, that's not recommended obviously since if your server gets hacked they have easy direct address to the wallet on the node machine and it'll be gone before you can say "boo".

[kgb2mining]

but hey guys what's going on? in the last 20 days p2p lost about 70 out of 250 active users / addesses (although the hashrate scores 1ph more), share diff of the pool is very high for those who do not have a farm, I personally with 3 th / s i have not done a good share in the last 20 hours ... there is no way of remodulating the share diff of p2p so that it is not so difficult for small-scale miners have a decent payout and a little more stable? ok accept the variance I can tolerate, but it seems clear that many users they are leaving the pool

E

All I can tell you is that I am pumping out 4TH and a few months ago I was getting around 100.oo a day give or take a few good days and a few bad days...BUT - now I am lucky to get 10.oo to 12.oo per block and with 2 to 4 per day I am making no money and my electric is way over 1000.00 per month.
I am just about to give up on p2pool and see what happens else where........ Its just not doing it for me these days?
Any thoughts from anyone is welcome .........
I love it here but I am just at a point of killing myself!
I hate to stop but its about that level I think....
Dont want to put another 5000.00 into machines to just break even in 3 months.....

I think you're going to see the same results on any other pool, although your payments will probably be more consistent on a larger pool, though not much more in value.  This is not a p2pool issue, but the way bitcoin works in general, and which is why so many miners are starting to call it quits.

For example I switched my terraminers back over to BTCGuild a few weeks back because I found they suffered the 20% loss problem just like the S2's (it's about 10 pages back in the thread I think).  The 3.2TH/s over at BTCGuild were making the same amount on average per day than they were pointed at p2pool - roughly .05 - .07 BTC per day depending on luck.  Now, I say on average per day, because BTCGuild is larger and finds more blocks so you get more frequent, even payouts, while p2pool has less blocks but less folks so your payouts are less frequent but more value.

A few months ago those same terraminers were making more than double that per day on BTCGuild.

In the past 3 months we have had to go from the original 3.2TH/s up to our current over 10TH/s to keep our payment amounts at the least even with when we started.

That's the nature of the BTC mining beast.  Difficulty rises, and you need to invest in the same % hash upgrades to your farm to keep your payouts the same.  If you don't, your income trails off and you are in the position now where you're making less and it's costing more to make less.

There's a thread here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=416933.0 - where they did a comparison of 3 pools - p2pool, BTCGuild and Eligius - where they pointed 6 S1's at each pool.  The most important thing to look at is how over time since January you will see the payouts per week dwindle down from 3 BTC per week when it started to less than 0.5 BTC now, 8 months later.  You can see how the same hashrate becomes less and less over time, if it stays the same and is not increased.

I hope this helps to answer your questions.  By all means, please go ahead and try other pools and see what it's like.  I just personally think it's not going to make a very large difference either way.

[bryonp]

but hey guys what's going on? in the last 20 days p2p lost about 70 out of 250 active users / addesses (although the hashrate scores 1ph more), share diff of the pool is very high for those who do not have a farm, I personally with 3 th / s i have not done a good share in the last 20 hours ... there is no way of remodulating the share diff of p2p so that it is not so difficult for small-scale miners have a decent payout and a little more stable? ok accept the variance I can tolerate, but it seems clear that many users they are leaving the pool

E

All I can tell you is that I am pumping out 4TH and a few months ago I was getting around 100.oo a day give or take a few good days and a few bad days...BUT - now I am lucky to get 10.oo to 12.oo per block and with 2 to 4 per day I am making no money and my electric is way over 1000.00 per month.
I am just about to give up on p2pool and see what happens else where........ Its just not doing it for me these days?
Any thoughts from anyone is welcome .........
I love it here but I am just at a point of killing myself!
I hate to stop but its about that level I think....
Dont want to put another 5000.00 into machines to just break even in 3 months.....

I think you're going to see the same results on any other pool, although your payments will probably be more consistent on a larger pool, though not much more in value.  This is not a p2pool issue, but the way bitcoin works in general, and which is why so many miners are starting to call it quits.

For example I switched my terraminers back over to BTCGuild a few weeks back because I found they suffered the 20% loss problem just like the S2's (it's about 10 pages back in the thread I think).  The 3.2TH/s over at BTCGuild were making the same amount on average per day than they were pointed at p2pool - roughly .05 - .07 BTC per day depending on luck.  Now, I say on average per day, because BTCGuild is larger and finds more blocks so you get more frequent, even payouts, while p2pool has less blocks but less folks so your payouts are less frequent but more value.

A few months ago those same terraminers were making more than double that per day on BTCGuild.

In the past 3 months we have had to go from the original 3.2TH/s up to our current over 10TH/s to keep our payment amounts at the least even with when we started.

That's the nature of the BTC mining beast.  Difficulty rises, and you need to invest in the same % hash upgrades to your farm to keep your payouts the same.  If you don't, your income trails off and you are in the position now where you're making less and it's costing more to make less.

There's a thread here - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=416933.0 - where they did a comparison of 3 pools - p2pool, BTCGuild and Eligius - where they pointed 6 S1's at each pool.  The most important thing to look at is how over time since January you will see the payouts per week dwindle down from 3 BTC per week when it started to less than 0.5 BTC now, 8 months later.  You can see how the same hashrate becomes less and less over time, if it stays the same and is not increased.

I hope this helps to answer your questions.  By all means, please go ahead and try other pools and see what it's like.  I just personally think it's not going to make a very large difference either way.

I totally agree with you and understand what is going on. I was just curious to hear from others. I understand the difficulty levels and the drop in pay.... As we all know, it dosent stop the electric bill and its HUGE.
I love mining and all of it, but I dont want to take my money and invest thousands more and be behind the eight ball for months to catch up like I did with this 5000.00 investment on the 4 T. I am finally ahead of the game and made a few bucks.
I am at that crossroad.... yes I could invest again and start all over...... I dont know its a dilemma that I have to come to grips with. Maybe I will sell off all of my S-1's and just run 1 S-2 at some pool to keep my hands and head in the game............  Thanks for your thoughts as thats all I was looking for!......
Nobody understands this crazy game we play but those of us wrapped up in it!!!

[kgb2mining]

I ~believe~ the difference is you have to submit your node to p2pools.org, whereas p2pool-nodes.info grabs nodes from the network every ~30 mins?

I'm happy to report we will soon have a central resource for all this stuff

Sneak peak:

Ooooh that looks purdy!  Can't wait...

[kgb2mining]

I totally agree with you and understand what is going on. I was just curious to hear from others. I understand the difficulty levels and the drop in pay.... As we all know, it dosent stop the electric bill and its HUGE.
I love mining and all of it, but I dont want to take my money and invest thousands more and be behind the eight ball for months to catch up like I did with this 5000.00 investment on the 4 T. I am finally ahead of the game and made a few bucks.
I am at that crossroad.... yes I could invest again and start all over...... I dont know its a dilemma that I have to come to grips with. Maybe I will sell off all of my S-1's and just run 1 S-2 at some pool to keep my hands and head in the game............  Thanks for your thoughts as thats all I was looking for!......
Nobody understands this crazy game we play but those of us wrapped up in it!!!

Couldn't agree more...

It's good that you've at least gotten to the point where you're a little ahead.  Sadly there's many who haven't and may never, and it'll be a completely losing proposition for them.  If you sell your equipment now you'll even be that much more ahead of the game, and like you said if you can get maybe just one or two things to keep it going as a hobby it'll be enough.  I think honestly that's how many will need to treat it - a hobby where they understand they may lose more than they invest but it's still kinda a neat thing to be part of.

Mining is certainly more about the passion and the geeky side of it than any rational explanation can bear.  I suffer the same disease...

[Duce]

but hey guys what's going on? in the last 20 days p2p lost about 70 out of 250 active users / addesses (although the hashrate scores 1ph more), share diff of the pool is very high for those who do not have a farm, I personally with 3 th / s i have not done a good share in the last 20 hours ... there is no way of remodulating the share diff of p2p so that it is not so difficult for small-scale miners have a decent payout and a little more stable? ok accept the variance I can tolerate, but it seems clear that many users they are leaving the pool

E

All I can tell you is that I am pumping out 4TH and a few months ago I was getting around 100.oo a day give or take a few good days and a few bad days...BUT - now I am lucky to get 10.oo to 12.oo per block and with 2 to 4 per day I am making no money and my electric is way over 1000.00 per month.
I am just about to give up on p2pool and see what happens else where........ Its just not doing it for me these days?
Any thoughts from anyone is welcome .........
I love it here but I am just at a point of killing myself!
I hate to stop but its about that level I think....
Dont want to put another 5000.00 into machines to just break even in 3 months.....

Have you thought about the pencil mod for your S1s? You could still be in the game for a bit longer then sell them in a few more months. Just a thought.

[Matt Corallo]

GBT latency is the big issue for me as I'm 12,000+km of fiber away from Matt's US-West node which I'm using as it was 100ms faster than the AU node.
This is normal as any US-West servers are normally lower latency than Asia nodes due to network topology.

Currently GBT is between 0.2 - 0.4 so I'm happy with that and the low DOA and normal shares being found seems to support that things are running ok.

This on 7200 RPM Sata as the SSD died.

Where are you? Would a local node help?