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P2Pool is a distributed bitcoin mining pool. First, consider checking out the P2Pool Wiki for the latest information.
I think it would help to briefly explain it in terms of differences between p2pool, traditional pools, and solo mining.
Solo Mining
When you solo mine bitcoins, you have control of all aspects of mining. You decide which transactions ...
13
The BFL single produces high stale rates on P2Pool because of the way its firmware is designed. The BFL does 2^32 hashes and then reports any shares found. This takes it about 5 seconds.
With solo mining or typical pools, the work unit you get is valid for several minutes or until a new block is found (on average, one every ten minutes). So the average ...
12
There are two problems with scaling P2Pool:
The sharechain difficulty goes up as the pool gets bigger to maintain the rate of finding shares at around every 10 seconds. If everyone was using P2Pool then the difficulty of finding a share would only be 60 times less than the difficulty of solo mining, and so varience would go right up.
As more miners join, ...
11
Variance. Raw connection to p2pool will always have variance for a typical miner - if the pool is small there will be large pool-based variance, if it is large the share difficulty will be high and there will be large share-based variance.
Running a Bitcoin node is already nontrivial and going forward will become impossible for at-home miners. For example, ...
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No. P2Pool, unlike a normal pool, requires you to verify incoming transactions, and you can't do this without having all of the unspent transactions in the block chain.
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P2Pool: 17401 shares in chain (9127 verified/17405 total) Peers: 11 (0 incoming)
This means that P2Pool knows of 17405 shares, 9127 of which have been verified (indicating that you haven't been running p2pool for more than 24 hours), and 17401 of which are in the selected chain (meaning that there have been 4 orphaned shares globally in the past few minutes)...
7
The answer is hidden in this forum post here.
"You have the same problem that is common in P2Pool threads, your miner is (relatively) slow compared to the size of the pool, as such you are not solving the required 1 P2Pool share every 24 hours (not the work your miner is submitting). You will get paid when your miner solves a share with a difficulty ...
6
Since November 17, 2011 no fee is charged. Instead an optional donation of 0.5% is sent to the author of P2Pool to support future development.
If you don't want to donate to the author you can run P2Pool like this:
python2 run_p2pool.py --give-author 0.0 [USERNAME] [PASSWORD]
The 0.0 is a percentage of your earnings and can be set to whatever percentage ...
5
Time investment is not to be discounted so lightly. In addition to that, inertia and lack of awareness probably have a role. There's also the need for extra computer resources (ram mostly) to run the bitcoind and p2pool daemons. There's a bit of a higher variance as well, since the pool is relatively small.
If you do have some spare ram, and a bit of time, ...
5
Broadly speaking, there are two ways of paying pool miners. The first way is to have a wallet and send payments to miners through that when they ask for them.
The second way, which both eligius.st and p2pool use, is to keep track of how many shares people get, and set the coinbase transaction to pay the block reward directly to them once a block is found. ...
4
From the Wiki on P2Pool:
Each share contains a generation transaction that pays out to the previous n shares, where n is the number of shares whose total work is equal to 3 times the average work required to solve a block, or 17280, whichever is smaller. Payouts are weighted based on the amount of work each share took to solve - proportional to the p2pool ...
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In concept, P2Pool is much stronger than centralized pools. Unfortunately, most centralized pools still hold a high hash-rate.
You can see the global hash rate, and its distribution at http://bitcoinwatch.com/
My opinion is that miners are used to using slush, deep bit, and btcguild - and are either unaware of the incentives of P2Pool, or don't care.
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You may split the project and create your own distributed pool, but you choose to reap no rewards from doing so (the first 0.5% fee), and without a bonus to the block finder (the other 0.5% fee).
The pool combines both fair share rewards and a finder's bonus to compete against other pools. The initiator has so far earned 0.75 BTC for his development and ...
4
Many of these are irrational, but this is the summation of feelings from the P2Pool thread on Bitcointalk. P2Pool would be preferable for decentralization, but without a larger share of the global hashrate it seems doomed to obscurity.
P2Pool has high latency, high variance payouts. You get paid as much on average as any other pool, but people generally ...
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According to Greg Maxwell:
4.14kB/sec in, 10.7kb/s out; averaged over the last 30 days. 38GB in transfer total.
Significantly less than the full node that goes with it... p2pool used to be fairly large relative to the node; but greater amounts of load on the Bitcoin network have shifted the balance.
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The disadvantage of merged mining is the additional coin daemons you have to run in the background. They all use disk space, memory, cpu cycles and bandwidth. A more annoying issue is that most of them are no longer maintained and have bugs. You may find that they crash frequently - at least namecoind does.
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This looks like plain old bad luck.
P2pool is a small pool and 3 weeks is a short time. With current hashpower at pools this is like measuring BTCGuild for less than 12 hours. BTCGuild can have bad luck for 12 hours, and P2pool can have bad luck for 3 weeks.
That said, all pools underperform on average when compared to a simple expected income. That's ...
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You could run the Bitcoin client on a separate machine, and connect to it over the network.
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Many exchanges don't have a fixed deposit address for each client.
This means that when you want to make a deposit, it will give you an address and it will log that you are depositing to it. However, when they don't receive anything on the address, the address expires and might be reused for another client.
So when you use the address for mining, it's ...
3
P2Pool allows individual miners to band together and find blocks with the reward being shared directly with the miners who participated in finding the block. If you didn't contribute a pool share during a round, you wouldn't receive a payment for a block found by the round. The pool has a lower difficulty than the network but greater than an individual ...
3
Yes, the failover setting will tell cgminer to mine on a secondary pool when the first pool is unavailable.
Run cgminer with the following:
cgminer.exe --scrypt -o http://p2pool.org:9327 -u username -p password
--failover-only -o http://backuppool.org -u username -p password
This example mines LTC at p2pool and will mine at another pool of your ...
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BitPenny seems to be half the solution - it has centralized control, but its clients can verify it behaves nicely in some sense. But it still has central management. A 51% pool can pull off subtle attacks that aren't prevented by BitPenny. For example, it can prune competitors' blocks, which is not always detectable due to the network latency. It can also ...
3
There are several methods for a bitcoin client to find other nodes.
First of all they save a list of nodes from previous connections.
Of course this only works when they don't connect the first time.
If a client has no IPs stored it falls back to DNS-Seeds:
Bitcoin looks up the IP Addresses of several host names and adds those to the list of potential ...
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Dead On Arrival. The term is referring to about valid shares your miner discovers that were found too late to be included in the P2Pool internal block chain and therefor aren't paid to the miner. Counter intuitively a DOA share can still be a valid Bitcoin block.
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The pool calculates your hash performance from the number of shares that your miner produces. With so little hashing power, it's likely that your miner did not generate a single share, so to the pool it's indistinguishable from doing no work at all.
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I wrote a solution to this problem two days ago:
How to use p2pool with an accompanying standalone bitcoind
(since the windows gui version of bitcoin 0.5.1 crashes frequently when used with p2pool)
Assumptions:
OS: Windows 7
Bitcoin: Latest stable release installed and working - http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.5.1/bitcoin-...
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p2pool has a higher difficulty, so you won't be submitting many shares, with 30MH/s you will have a greater variance. p2pool is not the perfect solution for those of us with a low hashrate unfortunately.
The p2pool tells you how many shares you submitted but it's in the lines above the one you pasted, look for where it says Shares: 3 (2 orphan, 0 dead)
...
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with p2pool at least for the coins are 'merged' mining you cannot reconfigure them to go to any other account except for the default account of that wallet. However you may be able to work around this in one of the following ways depending on your coding ability.
Monitor P2Pool logs and trigger script
Watch the p2pool logs and when a block is found ...
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Running a public pool comes with the obligation to understand the underlying asset.
Rublik seems to have own proprietary software.
To run a public pool you at least need the following:
Knowledge of linux system administration/security.
A dedicated server.
A coder to write/edit a frontend, reward structure and payout process.
Of course the pool software.
...
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2013-07-09 00:46:43.467000 Local: 0H/s in last 0.0 seconds Local dead
on arrival: ??? Expected time to share: ???
There is no miner attached to the pool, "0H/s" means zero hashes per second. And since no hashing is being performed the dead on arrival and time to share cannot be calculated, and thus are unknown.
2013-07-09 00:46:43.468000 Shares: 0 (...
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