PSA: p2pool needs YOUR help!

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As you may know, p2pool provides true decentralized pooled mining. You share block rewards with other p2pool miners, but there is no pool operator(*) who could steal your coins (or even delay payouts) or short change your share of the pool, or get hacked, or anything else. Your payouts will come directly from the mined blocks. And since there is no central node for the pool, it is highly DDOS resistant. Even if you are using a public node, and that node were unavailable for some reason, you can easily switch to another one (see below).

This is where you come in. In the past people have had trouble using some ASIC-based miners with p2pool, and unfortunately growth of p2pool began to stall. While p2pool has been holding its own in terms of hash rate, the overall network has grown, so p2pool's share has declined to the point where blocks are not being solved on a regular basis. This further discourages miners (especially smaller miners) from joining.

We badly need more miners to increase the hash rate, solve more blocks, and keep p2pool available as a pure peer-to-peer alternative to the centralized pools.  

Fortunately, p2pool is now known to work perfectly with most of the newer miners including Ant Miner S1's and Cointerra Terraminer IV (others listed on the main thread and wiki). If you have any of these, please give p2pool a try.

There are two ways to use p2pool:

1. Use a public node(*). There is a list of public nodes here: http://p2pool-nodes.info/ . Some other public nodes that have been mentioned on this forum and have their own support threads are nastyfans.org:9332 (0% fee, merge-mined coins support the node) and http://mine.p2pool.com:9332  (1% fee).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=504700.0 [p2pool.com]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=86854.0 [nastyfans pool -- scroll down a bit on post #1]

2. Operate your own p2pool node. This is true decentralized peer-to-peer mining with no central pool operator. The down side is that you have to run your own copy of the p2pool software and a full bitcoin node. If you already have a full bitcoin node, adding p2pool is relatively low cost.  

Here are some resources for running your own p2pool node:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.0 [main thread]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=62842.0 [merged mining]
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=153232.0 [optimization and tuning]
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool [general info]

If you are willing and able to try running your own p2pool node and you have at least 5 TH of capacity, I will help you with setup and ongoing maintenance purely as a volunteer to help the community. No tips even.

(*) If you use a public node, there is an operator who could theoretically tamper with the node and cheat you somehow. I'm not aware of this ever happening. If you have doubts about a node, use another one.

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[AJMiles]

I want to help! I have been a big fan of P2Pool because it is virtually risk-free. Sometimes its good to have no pool operator and sometimes not.  
Most pools now are cloning each other and tons of scams are happening daily in the altcoin community because creating new pools are easy (COPY and PASTE).  

The scams that happen is that one day- the pool supports an altcoin, people go there to mine, and bam- NINJA VANISH, that pool is gone.

Lately, I converted my hashing power to a BTC Pool (NON P2Pool) due to my new gridseed scrypt/asics miners.  I was dedicated to mining on Jude Austin's P2Pool.org software- however, there isn't valuable information for miners there vs a pool with more details about ME, the miner. If P2P can provide more benefits for the user, then it would generate more buzz back into P2Pool.

I sent you a pm because I really want to help out in multiple ways. I look forward to a response.

[IYFTech]

P2pool needs to start helping itself before it can expect help from miners. There are issues with the software that have remained unsolved for many, many months due to a complete lack of development, not to mention a lack of support in the p2pool thread. Unless there is some development soon, p2pool will remain at the bottom of the pool ladder, before dying completely. This is what happens to all software that is not constantly developed & improved.
Bitcoin is moving mainstream, but p2pool is stuck in the "nerd" culture: it's far too complicated for the average new user to setup, tweak & get running correctly. New users want to be able to install it & forget it - it should be capable of installing all the necessary dependencies itself as well as discovering the optimal settings needed for the machine it is being installed on - a simple wizard setup or similar. The average noob does not use command line - they want a "pretty" GUI from where they can adjust all software settings, choose what coins to mine, etc, etc.

I believe in p2pool, I use it - but it's been abandonware for quite a while now 

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P2pool needs to start helping itself before it can expect help from miners. There are issues with the software that have remained unsolved for many, many months due to a complete lack of development, not to mention a lack of support in the p2pool thread. Unless there is some development soon, p2pool will remain at the bottom of the pool ladder, before dying completely. This is what happens to all software that is not constantly developed & improved.
Bitcoin is moving mainstream, but p2pool is stuck in the "nerd" culture: it's far too complicated for the average new user to setup, tweak & get running correctly. New users want to be able to install it & forget it - it should be capable of installing all the necessary dependencies itself as well as discovering the optimal settings needed for the machine it is being installed on - a simple wizard setup or similar. The average noob does not use command line - they want a "pretty" GUI from where they can adjust all software settings, choose what coins to mine, etc, etc.

I believe in p2pool, I use it - but it's been abandonware for quite a while now  

What issues? It works fine for me and at least several other people who are regulars on the p2pool thread. I can't guarantee it works 100% of the time for everybody all the time but I have had my own node running continuously on my small farm for several months with mostly no issues. It does have some resource leaks I think, but I resolved that by automating a once-per-week restart.

Your comments about an installer are well taken.

[IYFTech]

If you have to restart the software every week in order to resolve issues then you are not running it continuously are you?  

You have highlighted my point perfectly 

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If you have to restart the software every week in order to resolve issues then you are not running it continuously are you? 

i don't restart it, a cron job does. You do make some good points about user-friendlyness. Something like MinePeon for p2pool would be great. (The hardware is inadequate for p2pool plus a full bitcoin node though.)

But frankly what p2pool needs more than anything else right now is hash rate. I am willing to put up with some quirks (like a cron job restarting it weekly) to avoid any possibility of pools cheating me, pool wallets getting hacked, etc. and at the same time helping bitcoin to be more decentralized. I would think that some other miners would as well, which is why I'm offering to help them with the quirks.

[IYFTech]

P2pool will get the hashing power when the software operates properly & is user friendly. For this to happen it needs development, as I said above.

Weather you restart your machine or cron does it is irrelevant - the fact is that it has to be restarted in order for it to semi function - who wants software like this?

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P2pool will get the hashing power when the software operates properly & is user friendly. For this to happen it needs development, as I said above.

Weather you restart your machine or cron does it is irrelevant - the fact is that it has to be restarted in order for it to semi function - who wants software like this?

I do. No risk of pool cheating or hacks, bitcoin stays decentralized. The benefits easily outweigh a few quirks. The bottom line is that it all works great once set up properly. Even during the brief (weekly) restart my miners just fail over to an alternate pool, so no hash rate lost.

[IYFTech]

Well, if you're happy with faulty underdeveloped clunky command line software that you have to restart every week - that's fine 

Unfortunately 99% of noob mainstream potential miners wont be happy - which is why they don't use it. This is the reason every other pool has grown with the network hash rate while p2pool is still floundering at the bottom. Sad but true.

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Well, if you're happy with faulty underdeveloped clunky command line software that you have to restart every week - that's fine 

Unfortunately 99% of noob mainstream potential miners wont be happy - which is why they don't use it. This is the reason every other pool has grown with the network hash rate while p2pool is still floundering at the bottom. Sad but true.

It doesn't really explain it since public nodes such as p2pool.com don't involve any command line at all. Running your own p2pool nodes as a noob miner is largely impractical and growing increasingly impractical all the time due to the need to run a full bitcoin node. 

What I don't understand is why the larger scale industrial and semi-industrial mining farms with at least 5-10 TH are not using it, and I'm volunteering to help them do so.

I'm going to lock this thread and repost at some point because I'm a bit annoyed at your thread crashing. This was not inteded as a general discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of p2pool. It has its own thread for that. Use it.