A second pool, non-p2pool would be nice.
Still no alternative pool?
Looks like pool-hopper interest in ATC waned after the price dropped on the two exchanges, so the Coinminer pool has dropped to an all-time-low of around 10GH/s for the past couple of days. The monthly chart for the pool at
http://coinminer.net:19982/static/graphs.html?Month is full of vertical jumps and drops as big miners rotate in and out of the pool.
Still, based on my back-of-the-envelope calculations the overall network is still humming along, as it has still averaged about 250GH/s for the past 24hrs, minting blocks a bit slower than 10 per hour at the current 50K difficulty which was based on 339GH/s.
Question for both of you... how would another pool improve anything here if the bigger miners stay solo? I agree that it would be nice if the unidentified 240GH/s would come out into the open... I would have thought (at least in Bitcoin) "more" P2Pool would be a good thing.
Hrm, I guess with P2Pool, if we don't know who the various big 100GH/s or 200GH/s or 300GH/s miners are who pop in and out of the Coinminer pool, then it doesn't matter if they're in the pool or not, they're unknowns and that's bad. Are you concerned that they could be a single entity controlling > 50% of the hash power even now?
Pankkake, are you saying you'd like to see a non P2Pool pool because that would at least have an identified owner/BDFL because then we'd know the "balance of power" on the ATC network? Then we could say Pool X has x%, Coinminer has y%, and unknown is z%? And then, since individual miners would know that GoodGuyGreg runs Pool X, they could shift their hash too and from Pool X or Coinminer if either gets too powerful?
I guess a second pool would be handy for uptime/failover for pool miners, and if Coinminer were again a big chunk of the network, for <buzzword>decentralization</buzzword>.
Are there other benefits of more pools that I'm missing?
