Quote from: forrestv on June 21, 2014, 06:14:55 AM

As jedimstr said, I did receive a sizable donation from the Litecoin Project (EDIT: credited wrong organization), and I have since been brainstorming and prototyping ways to fix the core problems with P2Pool - scalability and excessive variance for small miners. I prototyped a way to do trustless verification of blocks with O(1) storage so that we could free most P2Pool nodes from needing a local *coin node. I've spent a ton of time thinking of ways to implement parallel sharechains so that we can have shares more often, decreasing variance for small miners, while decreasing the strict latency requirements for hardware, sadly without any concrete results yet. Because this is a hard problem. I spent hundreds of hours in the summer of 2011 thinking about how P2Pool could possibly work, in a time before merged mining or pools with coinbase payouts even existed. Any further improvements that get us out of this local maxima that we're stuck in will require comparable amounts of thought. Some relief though - a few days ago, when people prodding renewed my eagerness, I may have made a breakthrough in ideas for how to get parallel sharechains to work (which I discussed in #p2pool).

Despite that, it is hard to work on this project when most people insist on cutting off the pool donations to me. When I see guides telling people to use --give-author 0 without any mention made of what it does, people blindly following them, or people asking me for help, providing screenshots of them running P2Pool with donations disabled, it hurts a bit. Actually, more than a bit. Right now, I get 0.09% of the revenue from P2Pool due to node donations (which default to 1%), which likely means that about 90% of people have completely disabled donations. That doesn't result in much revenue. Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working, which is the equivalent of two weeks of pool donations - if I were being paid minimum wage! I don't have a job (I am a student) and I do have other side-ventures that I'm working towards that look a bit more optimistic, so pardon me for rationally allocating my free time.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development - pool donations have been comparably low for a very long time, since before this development hiatus - so I don't think I'm being "punished" for not working hard enough or obviously enough. I don't think that most miners ever think about their donation amount again after setting it or pay attention to development. (I don't blame them for not dedicating their lives to tweaking P2Pool. Tongue

) But this is vicious downward cycle and anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite. It's simply a lack of foresightedness when miners decide to prioritize an amount of income that is invisible in the noise of variance of P2Pool payouts over the sustainability of P2Pool. Perhaps we'd be better off if I hadn't changed the mandatory 0.5% fee to an optional 0.5% donation (does anyone here even remember that?).

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).

Hello, Mr Forrestv
I represent P2POOL Chinese users thank you, thank you always hard to pay, we have been using a 1% donation to express our gratitude.
But in December 2013, P2POOL encountered a problem, bitcoin difficulty of continued growth in, small miners can only choose to leave.
I have tried to contact you, try to communicate. I hope you can solve some problems, but you disappeared.
P2POOL income has been declining, we have suspended the donation. 2014 we did not donate, because you do not continue to work for P2POOL, up to eight months.
P2POOL 2013 in December, creating a very good income. April 23, 2014, I took my Chinese friends, try to P2POOL impetus,
We have assembled a force of about 250T count P2POOL, until June 20, 2014. We are their own servers, non-profit pools, revenue is not good, you're better than that
We know, we have no reason to donate to you. We continuous losses, still insist on P2POOL mining BTC.
We are very sad, so June 20 we left P2POOL. You are very lucky to have a count of about 300T of unknown force mining in P2POOL, they also have a lot of 0 donations
Did you say they are hypocrites? ? ? If they leave, you will lose your time and effort spent countless while building P2POOL, P2POOL will collapse.
Your time is limited, miner's time is limited. We should understand each other.
I saw the June 22 and 27, have updated and P2POOL again， shown remarkable performance gains, if these updates are really effective to improve the income,In July I will return to the set count force P2POOL, and consider donating. But if the performance is still so poor, we do not need to return to P2POOL.