P2Pool Update

We intend to update the network information for p2pool in our official repo. The updated code is available now, but the network wont officially be live until the listed date.This involves a change to how long a share is valid, currently a share is only valid for 3 blocks. This setting was borrowed from Litecoin, and it has proven to be too low for us. With this new update it will be adjusted to 12, that should hopefully improve the p2pool experience for people with low hashrates everyone. As every worker's share will now be valid for a longer period. Another change (thanks to roy7) in this update is that share difficulty is now calculated on a per-worker basis instead of on a per-node basis, so share difficulties should be lower, to make it more like mining on your own node (if you're mining on a public node).

This update requires a hard fork of the network, which means we will have two p2pool networks running in parallell for some time while everyone interested updates to the newer version. Don't panic, it won't be like hardforking a wallet, no paid coins will go invalid. It just means that to benefit from this update you need to upgrade to the new settings. It might also mean that blocks will come a little slower for a while if not everyone comes along with the update (as we will split into two). The point of this pre-announcement is to mitigate that. Also moving to this new network means that the we'll get a new sharechain, a.k.a. any shares from the old network won't transfer over.

The p2pool scanner and all the seed nodes will be upgraded to this version on 13th february at 22.00 GMT. Any node left on the old network will continue operating as normal, but will not show up in the scanner until upgraded.

Hopefully people will catch on fast and update.