Additional subsidy for P2Pool users: 1-3btc/day

[Rassah]

New miners: I'd be interested to know to what extent the subsidies affected your decision to join p2pool.

I found out about them after I moved. My reason for moving were low mining fees and distributed mining as opposed to centralization, so bonuses are  a plus. (Only other low interest pool I knew of was Eligius, and I didn't want to be there)

[scintill]

New miners: I'd be interested to know to what extent the subsidies affected your decision to join p2pool.

The subsidies got me to invest the time/risk to try it out (risk being, I'm more concerned about my p2pool instance dying and my miner not failing over, or something like that.)  Unfortunately with my measly hashrate (360) I haven't received any subsidies yet. Still, I appreciate them!

Also, this is OT and may be addressed somewhere in the main pool thread:  my earnings over the last ~2.5 days seem lower than in a normal pool.  Is this just a matter of the short time I've been measuring, or is there some other factor?

Thanks again.

[Rassah]

Also, this is OT and may be addressed somewhere in the main pool thread:  my earnings over the last ~2.5 days seem lower than in a normal pool.  Is this just a matter of the short time I've been measuring, or is there some other factor?

Thanks again.

I think it's the high variability. There were times when I got nothing for two days, or 0.07btc, and once I got 0.49btc. I also got two 0.01 subsidy payments. I'm hoping over the course of a week/ month it will average be the same as what I get on a regular pool. (550mhash here)

[Mike Hearn]

I've completed the distribution of my 20 BTC ($120) of subsidies. I'm happy to see that p2pool has grown during this time.

I won't be restarting the subsidies for now, because it seems that they weren't making a big difference: the bottleneck to p2pools growth appears to be simplicity and ease of use at this point rather than the need for financial incentive. If Forrest tackles these issues and the bottleneck to growth becomes merely inertia, I might restart subsidizing the pool.

[Rassah]

I still like the idea of cgminer p2pool integration. If joining was as easy as running your bitcoin software and just starting cgminer with -p2pool option, a lot more people would join, especially newbies, since starting one program with one option is way simpler than signing up on a pool web page and setting up custom configuration on a miner to connect to it. As far as I understand it, everything the miner and p2oool need to work (bitcoin address, localhost) it can already grab automatically from your own system.

[coretechs]

Integration would be really helpful.  For bigger miners with lots of nodes, the current setup is pretty flexible though.  Just run it on a box with bitcoind and point all your miners there.  Do what is right for bitcoin and benefit - no more DDoS outages and better control of your hashing power.

I'm donating to miners on p2pool

Anyone feel like matching?

[gnar1ta$]

Setting up one server for multiple miners isn't that much more work.  I think the bigger issue, and it is more easily solved, is monitoring.  I think a monitoring tool like BAMT's mgpumon would really help push some farms over, especially if it could send out alerts of idle miners (like many pools do).  I'll put up 5BTC for any monitor that I can access over ssh with a browser to monitor rigs running cgminer to a single p2pool node. And another .5 for 10 days to join coretechs if someone can tell me how to do it from a gui wallet.

EDITED

[coretechs]

And another .5 for 10 days to join coretechs if someone can tell me how to do it from a gui wallet.

The donation script is now disabled.  Thanks to everyone who donated.

You could trust my cron job to do it for you.  

It will send a fixed amount once per day at a random time to miners at p2pool.  The amount is based on the balance at the following address:

Any donations to this address will be sent to the p2pool miners

The job script is dynamic and sends a fixed amount based on the balance of the address in the wallet.

1-10 balance -  1 BTC per day
10-99 balance - 2 BTC per day
100-999 balance - 3 BTC per day
etc.

This should work for now.  I can change the daily amount later if a lot of people start donating.  I will fund it with the remaining 9 BTC of my pledge later this evening.  If I decide to stop the job from running at any point, the remaining balance will be sent to all miners in the pool at that time.  I just set this up to take care of my donations so I don't have to send them manually but I figured why not open it up to anyone else.

(1/20/12): BTC sent.  You can track the deposits here ("Received"):
(1/21/12): had to do some wallet cleanup, address now shows correct balance
(1/24/12): donation history updated
(1/26/12): added some better logging that I will include in the donation history going forward
(2/7/12): minor network issue last night prevented the donation from being sent, so two payments were sent this morning
(2/8/12): made some changes to the script to adjust the timing intervals, additional payment sent yesterday
(2/19/12): final donation sent.  The remaining amount was too small to split effectively so I sent it to forrestv (p2pool author)
 

This was the final donation.  The amount was too small to split effectively so it was sent to forrestv.  Thanks for everyone who donated and a special thanks to forrestv for his continued support and excellent software.  The total amount donated to p2pool miners was ~43 BTC.  

[gnar1ta$]

any monitor that I can access over ssh with a browser to monitor rigs running cgminer to a single p2pool node.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57342.0

This won't give me p2pool stats...but it does look great, if only I could figure out how to install it.

And another .5 for 10 days to join coretechs if someone can tell me how to do it from a gui wallet.

You could trust my cron job to do it for you.  

It will send a fixed amount once per day at a random time to miners at p2pool.  The amount is based on the balance at the following address:

Sent 5

[Syke]

New miners: I'd be interested to know to what extent the subsidies affected your decision to join p2pool.

Definitely. Any time spent reconfiguring miners is lost money. The subsidy was enough to let me take down my miners and switch them to p2pool without losing anything.

Another factor was the size. With 100+ GH/s, blocks come on average slightly better than once a day. That's low enough variance for me. I can just monitor my bitcoin address from anywhere to see if everything is still running.

The final point was the decentralized nature. I don't like seeing Bitcoin in 2-3 centralized pools. P2pool is magic.

My only concern at this point is the stability of the p2pool script. That needs to stay running 24/7. Thankfully no problems in the first few days.

[scintill]

Setting up one server for multiple miners isn't that much more work.  I think the bigger issue, and it is more easily solved, is monitoring.  I think a monitoring tool like BAMT's mgpumon would really help push some farms over, especially if it could send out alerts of idle miners (like many pools do).  I'll put up 5BTC for any monitor that I can access over ssh with a browser to monitor rigs running cgminer to a single p2pool node. And another .5 for 10 days to join coretechs if someone can tell me how to do it from a gui wallet.

EDITED

I've just found http://<p2pool node addr>/local_stats and /recent_blocks .  If you have a JSON viewer extension in your browser, they look pretty decent for keeping an eye on things.  I was wondering, besides watching transactions on my payout address, how I'd know when a block was found.

[Mike Hearn]

Yeah, stability really matters. I hope the crash p2pool triggers gets fixed.

Holliday, your thread is a great idea, but you may want to put the tl;dr at the TOP. Your post is huge and reads like a manifesto. Putting the punchline at the top will help get people who are busy but already understand Bitcoin.

I didn't realize that some people care about reconfiguration time. It doesn't seem like that'd lose you all that much money, but nice to know the subsidies helped ride you through it.

[cereal7802]

http://blockchain.info/tx-index/14569324/35f2539eb2da9bb42177032f0ad62e91f12c61eb1531bfcfad8d395eb632f4dd



its not much. but i had to try it

[coretechs]

I cleaned up the wallet, it should track correctly now.

[thirdlight]

If I'm not mistaken, we've just received another 9.74+ coins for the miners! This is awesome! Thank you whoever sent this!

... some of which has just been paid out in a block that p2pool found. Block 163326 was worth 52.06618496 btc to p2pool miners!

[ThiagoCMC]

using bitcoind:

./bitcoind sendmany "" "$(wget -O- http://forre.st:9332/patron_sendmany?total=1.5)"

Donation sent! 1.5 BTC - 976e61b19c998394011a4332e08b7b5c774fde775ae3734846c004efe490d321

Cheers!
Thiago

[ThiagoCMC]

Donation sent!

$ bitcoind sendmany "" "$(wget -O- http://MY_IP:9332/patron_sendmany?total=2.0)"

f98e7ffb491fd4efae01c9a9aae2c146fdccdfe0b28fa8fdbd2c3130d78b9c03

Cheers!
Thiago

[TheHarbinger]

Donation sent!

$ bitcoind sendmany "" "$(wget -O- http://MY_IP:9332/patron_sendmany?total=2.0)"

f98e7ffb491fd4efae01c9a9aae2c146fdccdfe0b28fa8fdbd2c3130d78b9c03

Cheers!
Thiago

Holy crap!  I don't know what happened, somehow I got 0.3 BTC from that donation, while most everyone else got far less.  Looks like the next highest share was like 0.1BTC.  Something is amiss,  Because I'm quite sure I don't have 3x the hashing power as anyone else on P2Pool.

Someone explain this please?

http://blockchain.info/address/153B6PKQa3UaeSir8juvtg2Err7xVgz6UD

[ancow]

Donation sent!

$ bitcoind sendmany "" "$(wget -O- http://MY_IP:9332/patron_sendmany?total=2.0)"

f98e7ffb491fd4efae01c9a9aae2c146fdccdfe0b28fa8fdbd2c3130d78b9c03

Cheers!
Thiago

Holy crap!  I don't know what happened, somehow I got 0.3 BTC from that donation, while most everyone else got far less.  Looks like the next highest share was like 0.1BTC.  Something is amiss,  Because I'm quite sure I don't have 3x the hashing power as anyone else on P2Pool.

I'm not 100% sure how "patron_sendmany" works, but it doesn't seem to account for all shares in the current sharechain, just the last couple. That means you just had a lucky streak and generated 3x as many shares as anybody else in whatever interval of the sharechain "patron_sendmany" looks at. Others like me who had a personal unlucky streak and no shares found in a longish while didn't get paid at all.

[thirdlight]

I'm not 100% sure how "patron_sendmany" works, but it doesn't seem to account for all shares in the current sharechain, just the last couple. That means you just had a lucky streak and generated 3x as many shares as anybody else in whatever interval of the sharechain "patron_sendmany" looks at. Others like me who had a personal unlucky streak and no shares found in a longish while didn't get paid at all.

Probably the "small miner lottery". See this post.