P2Pool still worth mining?

Question

Folks, I've been mining with a locally setup p2pool setup using bitcoind v0.9.0rc1-beta, p2pool version 13.4-14-g7aa75ce-dirty and bfgminer on another host. Been mining for about 7 months with 6GH which paid about 80m overall.

In the past few months, the global pool has grown to an insane 3.2 Peta and the payout dropped to nothing at all. I did upgrade to about 65GH a couple weeks ago which obviously is still a drop in the water. There has been zero payout over the past 2 months even though the local DOA is low (mostly less than 5%, typically 4). The point is that in 7 months, there's been 28 total shares found with 3 orphaned and 5 dead.

There are plenty other articles here talking about p2pool not being best for "low" hash rates. Can anyone recommend fair alternatives? There's another post here that explores a patched version of p2pool with adaptive difficulty and there are other pools which claim to remain decentralized (eligius and bitpenny).

Would anyone care to share their luck (or lack thereof) with p2pool and or other alternatives?

Answer 1

Look at it this way:

• Everyone trying to solve a Bitcoin block is actually competing against everyone else (I win you lose.)
• Pools in general are essentially a pack of miners who collectively agree not to compete with each other, but agree to collectively compete against everyone else who is not in the pool. Pools grew in popularity as the difficulty grew and theoretically it has some advantages.
• p2pool, of course, follows this same model, except now that the difficulty of obtaining a p2pool share is so difficult, small hash rates have become obsolete in the p2pool model
• The p2pool model is a great idea and is still viable for anyone with at least 1 ths, but the model needs an update: The share chains needs to be larger, the share rate needs to increase making the difficulty go down. This will allow even the small miner to chip in. Every hash counts.