Quote from: kano on March 03, 2015, 12:17:41 AM

Maybe p2pool could consider some (more complex) version of that in the share chain to force miners to use a diff related to their hash rate and thus allow smaller miners to reduce their variance.

Been looking around the past month of posts and saw this. I think I recall a conversation once that it'd be nice to scale the difficulty target for miners to target some preferred # of shares in the sharechain. It does this already in some regard as I think there's a cap the target for a hash rate can't be so low that you'll find more than 5% of the full share chain's % of shares on average. (Going by memory and haven't touched p2pool since last April.) However that's realistically way too high. For low variance payouts for a large miner, you only need to keep a few shares in the chain at all times. This is a reason "friendly" large miners could use /DIFF to kick their difficulty targets way higher... they'd have less shares in the share chain (leaving more room for smaller people and reducing their variance), but the shares they do have are worth that much more during payout.

Actually I used google and spent some time trying to find what I'm thinking of. I did. It's here, the bottom portion of this post:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg4830990#msg4830990

with small followup:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18313.msg4831519#msg4831519

What I provided was a different way to calculate target difficulties for large miners such that they'd always have shares in the sharechain (amount of payment would vary, but they'd almost never miss a payment totally). For large miners it might drop the # of shares in the sharechain they were gobbling up by a factor of 10-15. Which means the sharechain difficulty is lower, making it easier for smaller miners to find shares.

Quote from: kano on March 03, 2015, 12:17:41 AM

Of course it has the problem of abuse by larger miners splitting up their 'farm' to multiple addresses and thus acting like multiple smaller miners - so that would have to be resolved some way I've got no idea how

It wouldn't be in a large miner's financial interest to push out/hurt smaller miners. Just makes p2pool network speed lower for everyone. Granted, the community is full of vandals though.

Edit: Correction, the hard code in p2pool was to make a miner's minimum difficulty target even if they said /1 to be such that they can only find 1.67% of the total share chain's shares. This is far too many shares for 1 miner to have, of course...