p2pool - Advancement of Decentralized Mining - Vital to Bitcoin Network Security

[spartacusrex]

Say there are 3 miners in all.

2 have a hash power of 1. 1 has hash power 2. Making a total of 4.

Without changing his difficulty the powerful miner would get 50% of the blocks. And the total hash rate of the network would be 4.

The Big miner then sets his difficulty to x2, effectively making him mine at the same speed as the other 2 smaller miners.

Now he gets 33% of the blocks, the same as the other 2 miners. BUT - if his block is not considered more 'worthy' of extension because of it's higher difficulty, the total network hash rate is now only 3.. We have just lost 25% of the power..

I have looked at the p2pool documentation but have not found reference to the actual way the longest chain is calculated,.. and whether the higher difficulty is used in the calculation.. if someone knows I'm all ears!

IF it is the case that your custom difficulty affects your shares 'weight', then a higher difficulty would mean your share is more likely to be the one that is extended in any chain race, and so less lightly to be a stale.. (Unless the total of all miners average each other out in some way) ?

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[roy7]

Now he gets 33% of the blocks, the same as the other 2 miners. BUT - if his block is not considered more 'worthy' of extension because of it's higher difficulty, the total network hash rate is now only 3.. We have just lost 25% of the power..

Stales have no effect on network hash power in terms of generating coins because stale shares that meet the block target are submitted to the coin daemon. If it is accepted, then the block pays out to the network even if it was a stale share for the share chain.

If it is the case that your custom difficulty affects your shares 'weight', then a higher difficulty would mean your share is more likely to be the one that is extended in any chain race, and so less lightly to be a stale.. (Unless the total of all miners average each other out in some way) ?

This wouldn't be healthy for the network. All shares should have the same chance of being stale. (Well, some nodes are more efficient than others, but it isn't because of the contents of the share.)

Miners using higher diff targets to help out smaller miners aren't hurt more by stales than anyone else. Yes when they have a stale share it is a larger loss than a smaller share would have been, but the smaller shares they are finding, the more stale shares they will have because it's all a %.

If you have a target of 1000 and a 1% stale rate, each stale share loses you 1000 diff 1 shares worth of work.

If you instead set target to /1 and have a 1% stale rate, then out of every 1000 diff 1 shares worth of work you lose 10 shares to stale and have 990 accepted.

In other words:

1000 per share * 100 shares = 100,000 shares of diff 1 work * 1% = 1000 diff 1 work (1 share) lost as stale.
1 per share * 100,000 shares = 100,000 shares of diff 1 work * 1% = 1000 diff 1 work (1000 shares) lost as stale

All in averages, of course. Total credit lost exactly the same. No matter what target you set, you'll lose stale % amount of it. The target will only change the variance of the stale cost.

[Carlton Banks]

IF it is the case that your custom difficulty affects your shares 'weight', then a higher difficulty would mean your share is more likely to be the one that is extended in any chain race, and so less lightly to be a stale.. (Unless the total of all miners average each other out in some way) ?

In addition to roy7's reply, also remember that higher difficulty shares get a higher reward as a proportion of blocks found.

[regtable69]

anyone able to help me with how to make this work after editing the networks.py files?
says it cant import network


.Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "run_p2pool.py", line 3, in <module>
    from p2pool import main
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/main.py", line 25, in <module>
    from . import networks, web, work
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/networks.py", line 1, in <module>
    from p2pool.bitcoin import networks
  File "/home/regtapool/p2pool-rav/p2pool/bitcoin/networks.py", line 1, in <module>
    from p2pool.bitcoin import networks
ImportError: cannot import name networks

[jedimstr]

Another bump for this thread.  So has any of the proposed donations and p2pool suggestions made any progress?

There have been no visible checkins on gitHub for the main p2pool branch for a long while now and barely a peep from forrestv. Others have tweaked here and there on their own forks or personal copies, but nothing has come in by pull-request lately either.

So LTC and BTC devs that have pushed for this and contributed... Has there been any movement?  With the recent uproar about GHash.io and centralized pools, and a push for p2pool again, perhaps it's time for an accounting and see if we're getting anything for our time and donations and suggestions or are we throwing BTC and LTC into development that's just not happening?

[EcuaMobi]

Is it possible to distinguish a block mined by a P2Pool from one mined by a centralized pool? are any traces left?

Would it be possible to (at some time) accept only blocks mined by p2pools? or least give some incentive?

[errkal]

Hi, IM new to P2Pool and working out if it is worth using or not, I only have 20ghs at the moment and soon to be 100ghs is it worth using p2pool or should I stick to traditional pools? Also atthe moment I have a time to share of 4.5 days is this normal ?

[Muhammed Zakir]

Hi, IM new to P2Pool and working out if it is worth using or not, I only have 20ghs at the moment and soon to be 100ghs is it worth using p2pool or should I stick to traditional pools? Also atthe moment I have a time to share of 4.5 days is this normal ?

This isn't the correct place to ask the question. 20GHs isn't worth mining in p2pool node but 100GHs would be good. The minimum hash rate recommended is 40GHs. Remember you will have to detect the electricity & maintenance costs when you calculate estimate profit.
Kindly,
      MZ