Quote from: norgan on September 23, 2014, 12:24:55 AM

Quote from: ckolivas on September 23, 2014, 12:21:20 AM

Quote from: norgan on September 23, 2014, 12:15:08 AM

Well full respect to you Con. What do you think of Bitmains comments on p2pool, what do we expect to see from them? I wish I had the spare cash (and power prices) to go buy a few chunky miners but it's just a hobby for me. Your pool is private atm correct? some of the work you are doing looks great, does it help smaller miners?

Bitmain's contribution to p2pool will not help regular miners. They see that being proponents of p2pool will raise their status in the eyes of potential customers. However it appears they simply want to run their own solo mining operation using their own p2pool instance which is really of no relevance to miners. Even if they dump their hashrate directly into regular p2pool, it just increases share difficulty even further, making it even harder for regular miners. The only way they may be contributing is by adding code/improvements to the p2pool network, but in my experience every hardware manufacturer directs the absolute minimum amount of effort towards software/drivers as possible to just expedite delivery of their hardware.

Offtopic about ckpool: There are public pools using the ckpool code - regular, solo and testnet. Just check the announce thread for the listed pools.

Thanks for the insight. p2pool has some interesting benefits but also some equally interesting draw backs as the total pool rate increases. a double edged sword as we yearn for more block and high hash rate we almost push ourselves out. will be watching closely.

Yeah found a certain pool running ckpool Wink

This exact problem has been discussed many times throughout this thread at different points in time. Windpath even offered up a bounty to get forrestv involved and fix the problem. Heck, even forrestv himself has stated he knows variance is an issue and had some "ideas", but never shared those ideas, or provided code.

As you're discovering, the larger p2pool's total hash rate gets, the larger the variance for the individual miner. If Bitmain truly does dump a ton of hashing power onto the regular p2pool network it will make the acceptable minimum entry hash rate out of the realm of possibility for most "hobby" miners. You're seeing it now with your S3. Imagine what happens with 10 or 20PH/s on p2pool. At 10PH/s, the share difficulty will be around 70,000,000. At 20PH/s, it's about 140,000,000. That means in order for you to find at least 1 share per day, at a total network hash of 10PH/s, you will need at least 3.4TH/s.