Worked just fine but it was far from paying anywhere near what the PPS pool I left was making me even when it had donations out the wazoo. The hashrate is low and blocks are not solved often. You can go 1, 2 or even worse 3 days with zero payout.

I quit many moons ago due to horrible random payouts that never seem to be anywhere ear what any other pool will make you. Maybe I had it setup wrong or maybe it pays like crap.. It certainly paid me less than 1/3rd of what I could have mined at a PPS pool in the same time.  Its a great idea no one seems to care for and it seems mostly because it pays like crap.

Apparently you didn't read the original post in details. Your post doesn't bring anything useful to the discussion if you:

• don't tell when you tried p2pool (was it before the orphan blocks problem was solved?)
• for how long you tried it: with the current hashrate you can get easily between 80 and 120% PPS for 30 days. If you tried it for less than 3 days you can even get between 0 and 200% PPS.

So nothing new here: you probably experienced variance and didn't like it. That's OK if you are looking for predictable payments and don't want to bet on p2pool's hashrate growing (and thus lowering variance) but I fail to see anything that would deter someone who would want to make the most of its miners in the long run...

Added a TL;DR; chapter

Small precision about the whole network efficiency.

Added a FAQ entry for the stratum/scrypt problem between cgminer and P2Pool.

Added a link to the Consolidated Litecoin Mining Guide for 5xxx, 6xxx, and 7xxx GPUs, more information about mining with Avalon.

Hum, there can be problems with low maxconnections. If I understand correctly, this depends on how fast you start p2pool after bitcoind because once all the connection slots are taken it refuses p2pool's attempt to connect.
bitcoind probably establish the first connections quite fast because it tries a number of "probably good" nodes first and then a slower discovery process begins.

I'll add this to the guide, thanks.

The very first post explains that this isn't the place to discuss this unless you have solid data showing that there is a bug somewhere: this thread is for discussions on how to optimize a P2Pool miner's setup not gut feelings.

Over the last 3 months I got 98% PPS with P2Pool. If you call that awful I suppose you can only mine on fee-free pools.

When I track my income over the last 6 months I get ~100.5% PPS.

I really wish people would stop with their gut-feeling and track what their real income is (or at least post such nonsense somewhere else).

Which ones? p2pool.info shows 95.9% for 90 days which is already as good as any PPS pool and it doesn't even include yesterday's donation to P2Pool miners from Gavin (for lost income during the fork). "awful" should mean far below standard pools, the numbers don't lie: we aren't far below standard pools. At 98% we are arguably above most of them.


You didn't read the first post or you wouldn't post this kind of question as I explained on what basis I study p2pool's luck.
Even if some weeks are "bad", I never commented on one in particular here.

So your question is bogus and even if it weren't you should already have the answer.

Obviously you aren't here to discuss the subject and instead wish to spread FUD. Please do it elsewhere.

I am not asking a question, or spreading FUD.  Simply correcting your erroneous statement of "last week was bad".  The last 90+ days prior to this week were bad, according to the p2pool stats page.  Now if that stats page is faulty, I sit corrected.

M

You keep referring to something I didn't write. I hate that: you are really trying my patience.


The stats page is indeed certainly missing a block which was found during the fork so it's faulty. But even then you didn't say that the luck was "slightly bad" (4.1% below average) but you said "awful". This, by definition, is FUD: you are exaggerating the bad luck which is mostly harmless (4% is within the normal fee range on most pools) to make P2Pool look bad.

And worst of all: you keep coming back on this subject on a thread which doesn't address it and explicitly says so in the first post.