There will be no changes to the p2pool code before launch. You could merge-mine monocle now if you had the wallet by just starting p2pool with
run_p2pool --net vertcoin --merged http://monoclerpcuser:monoclerpcpassword@127.0.0.1:monoclerpcport
Since forrestv implemented merged mining support for Namecoin in p2pool some time ago. It's a bit on the proof of concept level though and has since been kind of forgotten by the maintainer I think.
(...)
Which is why we are releasing a
temporary solution (my p2proxy payment scripts) for public nodes, so that they can pay their miners. What p2proxy does is sit between the p2pool node software and the miner and maintains its own shares (with a difficulty different from that of p2pool). This is done to allow it to credit miners for work even when a share hasn't been found yet (like a regular pool). This means that the monocle blocks and Vertcoin p2pool shares that get found will be paid out to the pool's wallet (or some other address if you want) and paid to the miners addresses once the coins mature. But I'm not done updating p2proxy for monocle merged mining yet.. and I now I need to get back to finishing that up.
Thank you for the post. I really wanted to get more details on the p2pool solution.
But I'm sorry, at the moment my reaction to this is: I'm out, as far as my public p2pool nodes are concerned. While I clearly see the difficulty to implement a shared chain solution, I'm definitely not doing anything like "collect & payout" for my VTC miners. For me, not having a pool wallet is one of the main reasons for using p2pool.
I've to think a bit more about what to make of this.
Yes I can understand that - we forsee the solution at release being a temporary one, hopefully a distributed mining solution will be available soon. As the situation stands at present however, there's no payout system at all for merge-mined coins in p2pool, and in BTC and it's merged chains, centralised pools have been the only way for individual miners to get payouts, so even though this temporary solution we're implementing isn't fully decentralised, it's still markedly better than the existing situation with BTC since it encourages mining on p2pool for VTC, albeit at the cost of making each node behave like a centralised pool for MON payouts.