Power Off Dash Miners for Short Time on P2Pool

Question

I've been DASH ASIC mining (3 miners) for about 1.5 months. I have accounts with the NiceHash and SuprNova pools. I switched to the P2Pool (peer-to-peer pool) method just this evening.

I have typically powered my miners off for about 2-3 minutes per night to make recordings for another activity of mine. I am assuming that as long as I leave my P2Pool program running and simply power my miners off for a short time, I should be fine.

This got me thinking about other needs for the future. When I eventually reconfigure my setup, update my server, update it's OS, or move my mining to a new location, I am guessing that if I setup my P2Pool programs and config file the same way, and start everything back up, I should be fine.

I just want to confirm that these assumptions are correct. If not, what's the best procedure for when you do need to do the above things?

Answer 1

Mine as long as possible, turn off only when needed. I haven't check Dash P2Pool, but most payouts use some form of PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares) payout (although some have different methods to calculate it), so the longer you're offline, the lower the payout will be if you hit a block (since your %age of the submitted shares will be lower).

This is intended to stop people "pool hopping" (when your pool hits a block or gets super lucky, you jump to a pool that is due to find one or particularly unlucky at that point in time, if you're lucky you can get both rewards. As you're paid depending on how many shares you've submitted, then you're not going to get paid as much because your work on the new pool is low, so it disincentivises that behaviour.

It's technically fine to stop mining for a few minutes, no harm to the machines (although heating them up and cooling down too often could pose a problem with components etc, but it's unlikely to be a big issue).

If you want to regularly turn them off, or for extended periods, then I'd advise sticking with something like NiceHash, since they use PPS (Pay Per Share), so any work you do is paid (although their fees may be higher).

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but stopping P2Pool and starting it shouldn't be a problem, I don't know how it stores it's statistics, but if it's a local version then it doesn't matter anyway, since you're the only one on that node.