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

[check_status]

my oppinion to the whole debate is simple: Last year i was part of the miningfarm developement project by xenland and we was able to mine some blocks. But then after i lost a major miner and the miningfarm project didnt come forward. Xenland chose to develop the cheaperinbitcoins project, so i pointed my own miners to BTCGuild. I observed problems there sometimes the PPS didnt count my shares even when i saw in my software had found a lot of them. This happend a few times so i decided to change to p2pool. Thats why i did setup a p2pool node. In the beginning it was quite different then pps but after a while i realized that it does not realy mather, cause i observed that the payout from p2pool is somedays even bether then pps and i have less trouble with mining and payout distribution. Allso the decentralization plays a major part for me.

Today i wouldt change back to pps. The developers from p2pool do a awesome job i realy love it! All you guys that come up with the calculations of what could be or what is not you realy seems to miss the point; instead of grumble - come up with own ideas how to improove the project !

Nobody will argue with you, except maybe for trolls, on the points that 1. P2pool is great software and 2. Forrest is underappreciated.

I have an idea, turning on spell checking will help to visualize cacographic representations.

If you don't know how to program, I don't and not everybody does, you could at least learn the theory in this 30 hour lecture series:
Lecture 1 | Programming Paradigms (Stanford)
Assembly language starts at Lesson 9, Python is somewhere at the end.

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[Icoin]

Nobody will argue with you, except maybe for trolls, on the points that 1. P2pool is great software and 2. Forrest is underappreciated.

I have an idea, turning on spell checking will help to visualize cacographic representations. Cheesy

If you don't know how to program, I don't and not everybody does, you could at least learn the theory in this 30 hour lecture series:
Lecture 1 | Programming Paradigms (Stanford)
Assembly language starts at Lesson 9, Python is somewhere at the end.

Yes you are right, my english is sometimes bad (its not my native language i learned it by my self)

Thanks for the link to the programming lessons

[Smoovious]

...

It is just as important for both of those groups of people, to have the rest of us common folk, poking sticks at it, to see if there are any creepy-crawlies still hiding inside.

It is a symbiotic relationship, which in the end, results in a more solid product.

Embrace us!

(oh... and don't forget to bring a stick)

-- Smoov

It is also important on a project like this to have people test. And that is what this is.

Isn't that what I just said?

-- Smoov

[mdude77]

I noticed something with the most recent version of p2pool.  Not sure which version introduced it, but it wasn't there before the last flurry of changes.

The local /static stats are omitting recent blocks.  They aren't orphaned blocks either.  Usually the rest are there, and one is missing, but with the recent poor L, it shows nothing, despite the fact we had a block 58 minutes ago (181207).

EDIT: Just for fun, I checked http://p2pmining.com:9332/static/, and it isn't showing the recent block either.

M

[Gomeler]

It is possible to disable logging to file? This is useless form me, only creating unnecessary disk writes.

log to /dev/null or to a ram disk.

Erm.. how? I want console output but same thing is saved to disk. I`m on Windows.

There is a flag with p2pool.py to indicate an alternate log output. I think on windows if you direct this to NUL it will perform the behavior you want. I don't have a linux box around at the moment and I can't be troubled to spin up a VM to test this.

[rav3n_pl]

I noticed something with the most recent version of p2pool.  Not sure which version introduced it, but it wasn't there before the last flurry of changes.

The local /static stats are omitting recent blocks.  They aren't orphaned blocks either.  Usually the rest are there, and one is missing, but with the recent poor L, it shows nothing, despite the fact we had a block 58 minutes ago (181207).

EDIT: Just for fun, I checked http://p2pmining.com:9332/static/, and it isn't showing the recent block either.

M

If block is found in orphaned chain of p2pool it is not shown on "internal" stats. It is possible to found block in main bitcoin chain and same time orphaned p2pool share chain. Thats why miner should send stales anyway

[kano]

...
If block is found in orphaned chain of p2pool it is not shown on "internal" stats. It is possible to found block in main bitcoin chain and same time orphaned p2pool share chain. Thats why miner should send stales anyway

The default in cgminer (since 2.3.6) is to send stales (it can be turned off - but obviously should not be for p2pool)
No idea about the other miners though.

[mdude77]

I noticed something with the most recent version of p2pool.  Not sure which version introduced it, but it wasn't there before the last flurry of changes.

The local /static stats are omitting recent blocks.  They aren't orphaned blocks either.  Usually the rest are there, and one is missing, but with the recent poor L, it shows nothing, despite the fact we had a block 58 minutes ago (181207).

EDIT: Just for fun, I checked http://p2pmining.com:9332/static/, and it isn't showing the recent block either.

M

If block is found in orphaned chain of p2pool it is not shown on "internal" stats. It is possible to found block in main bitcoin chain and same time orphaned p2pool share chain. Thats why miner should send stales anyway

I never saw this before the recent update.  If it got orphaned, would I have got credit for it?  Because I did.  It was the only block for the day we got.

M

[ancow]

If block is found in orphaned chain of p2pool it is not shown on "internal" stats. It is possible to found block in main bitcoin chain and same time orphaned p2pool share chain. Thats why miner should send stales anyway

I never saw this before the recent update.  If it got orphaned, would I have got credit for it?

If you had a share in the orphaned block's sharechain, then sure, you would get credit for it.

[mdude77]

If block is found in orphaned chain of p2pool it is not shown on "internal" stats. It is possible to found block in main bitcoin chain and same time orphaned p2pool share chain. Thats why miner should send stales anyway

I never saw this before the recent update.  If it got orphaned, would I have got credit for it?

If you had a share in the orphaned block's sharechain, then sure, you would get credit for it.

I guess I need to read up on how this works.  It doesn't make sense to me just yet.

Thanks.

M

[Aseras]

p2pool runs it's own blockchain. that's why the shares are lower difficulty. this blockchain can also fork and orphan blocks, however all shares stale, orphan and "valid" are submitted to the real bitcoin chain and if one is accepted regardless of it's p2pool blockchain validity you get paid from the real bitcoin blockchain.

Get it now?

[mdude77]

p2pool runs it's own blockchain. that's why the shares are lower difficulty. this blockchain can also fork and orphan blocks, however all shares stale, orphan and "valid" are submitted to the real bitcoin chain and if one is accepted regardless of it's p2pool blockchain validity you get paid from the real bitcoin blockchain.

Get it now?

That helps.  So when my local p2pool is telling me I have x shares, are those from the real blockchain, or the p2pool chain?

M

[Aseras]

That helps.  So when my local p2pool is telling me I have x shares, are those from the real blockchain, or the p2pool chain?

M

Those are shares in the p2pool chain that could also be pieces of a valid bitcoin block.  The payout value is a guess of your proportional hash power for a block if it solved at that instant weighted by your number of recent shares.

[gyverlb]

Was just thinking about our bad luck and decided to write it down just in case (might give ideas to others and make my understanding of p2pool more clear).
Could a proportion of miners not submitting stales in some peculiar way explain it ?
Are all stales both counted for the total pool hashrate and used as potential blocks if possible ?
Is it possible that some configuration (miner software + p2pool) could both make a potential-block stale share been thrown away (miner might consider it stale or p2pool) and at the same time broadcast other stales that are used to compute the total hashrate ?

We thought of an attack (were some miners could deliberately withheld blocks) but I don't see other ways that either an overvalued hashrate (?) or blocks being ignored. How is the hashrate computed anyway (I suppose you have to count stale and valid p2pool shares, are stales broadcasted to all nodes ?) ?

[Aseras]

The problem most likely lies in the overhead of p2pool. The shares in the p2pool blockchain have data added, the current miners and shares and payouts that have to be computed in as transactions and hidden in the bitcoin blockchain as an unknown transaction as well as all the current bitcoin blockchain transactions to be considered a valid share. the 10 second longpolls also mean that many created shares are rejected as late/stale and discarded especially for slower miners.

[gyverlb]

The problem most likely lies in the overhead of p2pool. The shares in the p2pool blockchain have data added, the current miners and shares and payouts that have to be computed in as transactions and hidden in the bitcoin blockchain as an unknown transaction as well as all the current bitcoin blockchain transactions to be considered a valid share. the 10 second longpolls also mean that many created shares are rejected as late/stale and discarded especially for slower miners.

As long as the miner can hash without having to work on something that can't become a block, overhead isn't a noticeable problem (it can increase the chances of orphan blocks, but the overhead should reach a level where latencies are around 30 seconds to have a ~5% hit on our luck). Given a 10s share interval target, a 30s latency would be detected by insane levels of dead/orphan p2pool shares.

[mdude77]

I'm now running two p2pools locally, on two different machines.  I assume it's okay if both point to the same payout address?  Or is that going to confuse the network?

[kjj]

I'm now running two p2pools locally, on two different machines.  I assume it's okay if both point to the same payout address?  Or is that going to confuse the network?

Yup, that is fine.  You may want to use different addresses to make it easier to track them, but you don't need to.

[rav3n_pl]

I'm now running two p2pools locally, on two different machines.  I assume it's okay if both point to the same payout address?  Or is that going to confuse the network?

Not easier run one p2pool and point both miners to one machine?

[mdude77]

I'm now running two p2pools locally, on two different machines.  I assume it's okay if both point to the same payout address?  Or is that going to confuse the network?

Not easier run one p2pool and point both miners to one machine?

My issue is cgminer likes sending a portion, somewhat small, but still a portion of my hashing to my backup server, which wasn't mine.  So I thought why not run p2pool somewhere else.. since I already have 3 machines running all the time, two of which have up to speed bitcoind running?  Seems to be working well, although I added my original backup server as #3 and cgminer still insists on sending some hash there.  Much smaller than before, but it's still sending it there.

M