Hello again everyone!
I've got a question about p2pool. Someone gave me an answer in another topic, but I think maybe I phrased the question wrong.
So, I've got my mining setup running, and things seem to be working (or kind of, this is where the question comes in)
Just for reference, because it seems the first thing I'm always asked: I'm using the P2Pool binary for Windows (Win7), Bitcoin-QT for a wallet, and CGMiner for my mining.
The first question I had asked was:
"Greetings all, and thanks in advance for any help you can give me. I'm new to bitcoin mining, have just got my system set up, things are running and I'm generating some BTC here and there. Things look ok, but I have a few questions that I still haven't been able to resolve.
It seems the longer I leave the mining running, the more share I get. I understand that, but my question is what happens if I have to shut down or restart my machine? Seems like last time I did that I lost my shares. I've got a couple now and need to restart after installing some software but I don't want to chance losing my payout. Are these shares saved once they have been mined? If I have those now, and turn off my machine and not mine for a couple days, will I still get the payout? Does my system have to be running when the block is found to get the payout?
Like I said, thanks for any help/advice/information you can send my way. "
The answer provided was:
"Each pool has their own rules for how they handle such things, so to a certain extent the answer will depend on which pool you are mining in (you didn't mention any pool in your question).
In general, I wouldn't expect any pool that is operated well to "lose" the shares you've already contributed, but some pools reward you based on the age of the shares you've submitted to prevent people from pool hopping."
That kind of answered what I was asking (thank you again DannyHamilton), that is - No, the shares are not lost, but saved in the blockchain for payment when a block is discovered.
So I happily went about mining, thinking that everything was fine and I would eventually get the BTC.
Now, I've been mining pretty much constantly since then. And I've seen this happen again. I will get a share, the p2pool binary will show a payout, and then later on, it will, for lack of a better word, disappear. During the course of the last 3 days, I've gotten 2 shares, showing a total BTC payout of 0.0056. This last block was a MOFO, and took 285% of normal time to complete. I've been installing and uninstalling some software (trying to get XNA Game Studio running to institute a cross platform release of my video game), and as such I've had to restart my system a number of times. The first couple times I did it, the p2pool binary came back up, showed my balance (0.0056BTC), and things seemed fine. Last night before calling it an evening, it had dropped to 0.0027BTC. I wasn't complaining, heck I still had a little payout. But when I got up this morning, the payout had dropped to 0.00. I checked the block list for p2pool at:
http://p2pool.info/, and sure enough, the last son-of-a-**** block had been found..... ... but I never received any payment.
I've read up on the p2pool website, and honestly, it isn't very helpful. So, my basic understanding is that when my miner produces a share, it becomes part of the current block, and it shouldn't matter if my rig is still running mining or if I'm surfing for alien cosplay midget porn- when the block is solved, I should still get my payment. I figured the response to the first question was something along the lines of: The share is not lost, but when you restart the p2pool binary, it is showing stats for the CURRENT round ONLY. In other words, it only keeps track of stuff since it was last started, which seems appropriate. But now, as of today, it had shares, showed a payment, then everything dropped to 0. Am I doing something wrong? At this point, it has become pretty annoying since basically the entire last 3 days was a waste.. ..
Thanks again for any input.
