Your project will be a fork of the current P2Pool software?
right now I do not have a project but I would be willing to start one. It would be stronger to be totally unique however a clone I think would be better than nothing.
I am open to ideas from people smarter than myself:)
i would prefer if sombody with money could convince ck (author of cgminer) to invent a smart-mining protocol. as soon as pools starting support for this it would solve ALL problems regarding big pools.
i think this is much more needed than another p2pool.
Can you explain in more detail what you are talking about?
the big plus about p2pool is that all miners build the block itself. it is not decided by forrestv - its the miners.
the only problem with big pools is that they decide which block (means transactions and features like bip16/bip17) to mine.
smart mining just means: the pool does only handle the payout and share counting, but does NOT decide about the block contents. this means a pool is not able to attack bitcoin - even if it has 90% of hashing power. and the miners still have their "votes" (votes as in this bip decision thing)
if all pools would use smart mining we dont have to fear 51% attack from a hacked pool any more.
of course the risk of cheating pool ops or stolen pool wallets will remain (stolen pool wallet risk could be circumvented as well, but thats up to the pool) - but the biggest issue for bitcoin itself is the 51% attack.
i know that eligius/luke-jr is working on something like that and bitpenny has a working implementation.
BUT: it seems that the bitpenny protocol cannot be used with other pools (dont know why; just heard that in a chat) and i dont know if that what luke-jr will do fits the average joe.
if cgminer gets a smart-mining client (as an addition) i am very sure that many pools will support its protocol.
sorry my english is not that good to explain it in more detail. but if you are really interested about that ask gmaxwell, gavin or luke-jr (all three a bitcoin devs). i am sure they would love you to support that idea (smart-mining was first mentioned by gavin (afaik); i am just trying to push this idea - because i really love it)