Re: [Bitcoin-development] A mining pool at 46%

[Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
> but I think p2pool still has a lot of problems dealing with
> FPGA/ASIC hardware and it hasn't been growing for a long time.

As an aside and a clarification— P2pool works great with FPGAs, and
one of the largest FPGA farms I've heard of uses it.  But it doesn't
work well the old BFL FPGA miners— because they have insane latency.
Likewise it doesn't currently work well with Avalon, again because of
insane latency.   P2pool uses a 10 second sharechain in order to give
miners low variance but that means that if you have a several second
miner you'll end up subsidizing all the faster p2pool users somewhat.

It was basically stable with the network until ASICminer came online
mining on BTCguild mostly and the first avalons started to ship, and
then the network went up 10TH in a couple weeks (and now 15TH) while
P2Pool stayed mostly constant.

ForrestV (the author and maintainer of the P2pool software) would love
to work on making Avalon and other higher latency devices first class
supported on P2Pool, but he doesn't have one— and frankly, all the
people who have them aren't super eager to fuss around with a 5BTC/day
revenue stream, especially since the avalon firmware (and its internal
copy of cgminer) itself has a bunch of quirks and bugs that are still
getting worked out... and I do believe that p2pool helps reduce
concerns around mining pool centralization. ... but I think as a
community we don't always do a great job at supporting people who work
on infrastructure— even just making sure to get them what they need to
keep giving us free stuff—, we just assume they're super rich Bitcoin
old hands, but that often isn't true.