Quote from: pmorris on August 20, 2014, 10:32:31 PM

Thanks for the comments. I appreciate it.

Good that you took the comments well, I wasn't meaning to be mean or anything, just opinions... sometimes folks get defensive and I didn't want to seem attacking

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Agree that a 1% total fee is something for people to think about. Especially when there are 0% nodes around.

The goal is that a high quality service would offset the costs by producing a superior return. Doesn't take much downtime or orphan shares to 'cost' 1% of your income. Of course my nodes are pretty new so there's no track record of that superior return of course to be fair

In the overall picture of how volatile the mining business is (given diff changes, new asics, power costs, USD/BTC exchange rate) in a way a fixed 1% is relatively small to the overall risk/returns. I guess I'm hoping that there may be some miners out there who are willing to pay a moderate fee for a reliable good quality service. Maybe mining is too hard nosed for that though.

Understandable. I'm sure there would be some that will use it, and surely I do understand that someone's gotta pay the bills at some level for the hardware, bandwith, etc and it's not totally unreasonable to want to try to cover at least some of that for providing the service. I think there's a lot of folks with bad tastes in their mouths from some of the proprietary pools that charge a bit and may be biased against it at all costs.

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You've got a good point about development funding. Although, if nobody makes donations to pay for p2pool development then will it continue to exist? Then we're left with the commercial pools using proprietary software and charging 3% fees with all the centralization and other issues that go with it. Tragedy of the commons I guess.

If there really is no significant movement in p2pool development for a few months then I imagine the community will just end up cutting donations to zero (if they're not there already) and hope that someone steps in to maintain the code.

We're pretty much at that point already - most operators have disabled all donations, and there's a partial vicious circle that's spawned from it (although I personally think the ship was sailing in this direction before donations started disappearing)

If you go back about 50-60 pages or so you'll get into the meat of the answer to most of your questions. There was quite a bit of discussion about/with forrestv when he initially went MIA, then came back briefly with a response that some took not too well (and honestly, I understand his response and why it came out the way it did, but it could have come across a little better IMHO).

To briefly summarize, I believe he is a student, started writing the code to a good result where we are now, but then wasn't getting too many donations, and re-prioritized his time to be less of p2pool since there was no "reward" for it anymore. He's been spotted making an occasional checkin to the git repo, but nothing of major substance, and development has stalled. He was even offered a bounty to fix a few things about 2-3 months ago, but was never heard from and the bounty went unclaimed and returned to the donators. So, at this point I'd consider the code almost "orphaned", with no clear direction or driver pushing to get things done.

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Let's see what happens anyway. If I can attract some hashrate to profile it I'd be interested to know if efficiency/returns are better than other 0% pools. If not then I guess we'll see.

I'd be interested to see as well if anything in your config makes it better. The gold standard to compare to right now I believe would be CoinCadence (windpath's node). His node seems to be well connected and well resourced as well, so it's probably a closer comparison. I'd also be happy to compare my stats with yours as well - our local node is a 16-core, 36GB RAM physical box on a 50Mbit backbone. The only difference is that we're behind a firewall and don't have any incoming peer connections allowed. If you read back this page or last you'll see my question about peering, which I think is along the lines of your thinking - better peers, faster shares in, etc.

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Would love to know what other miners think. Will you only consider using a 0% pool?

Me personally I now run my own node, because I thankfully have the resources to do so. I was on BTCGuild paying 2% before switching to p2pool (went to coincadence first, then built my own node), so quite honestly .5% was less than what I was getting dinged for so it would have been fine if that was the case. I just personally think it'll be a hard hump to get over since most are already used to seeing 0% nodes.