Quote from: nezroy on February 21, 2015, 01:41:08 AM

Quote from: kano on February 21, 2015, 01:10:03 AM

Development isn't the current issue.
You need a workable design that overcomes the current problems first ...

Can you summarize (or link to one?) as to what the current problems are? I'm relatively new to p2pool and haven't had a chance to catch up on all 600+ pages of this thread yet. Thanks

I would say the three main problems are:

1 - it's single threaded. that means it starts to bog down, FAST, with heavy loads.
2 - share chain difficulty is directly proportional to pool hashpower. the more hashpower there is, the higher the share chain difficulty, making it harder and harder for smaller miners to get a share.
3 - 30 second work restart. this directly relates to #2. p2pool targets to get a share on the alt chain once every 30 seconds. the more hashpower, the quicker shares are found, so the higher the share chain requirement. weak hardware (which is most of it) does not like 30 second restarts. some hardware tolerates it, but suffers (bitmain hardware with up to date firmware). some hardware is okay (spondoolies). some hardware doesn't work at all. increasing the time frame for a share means higher share difficulty. see #2.

I think #2 and #3 are the fatal flaws of the current p2pool design. Those have to change radically for p2pool to be successful on a wide scale.

When trying to solve #2 and #3 remember p2pool is decentralized. each share submitted to the alt chain is a potential block, and contains the payout information for all miners who've successfully submitted shares on the alt chain. furthermore, each p2pool node verifies the work submitted to the block chain.

M

EDIT: Most hardware today is designed with the BTC protocol in mind, which means complete work restarts every 10 minutes. That's 20x less frequent than p2pool. Most conventional pools (At least those I've watched the data flow through closely) submit new work every few minutes or less (without a work restart requirement), but they continue to accept old work until the miner can switch to the new jobs. p2pool doesn't do that. every 30 seconds (on average), it's a hard restart, and old work is ignored.