No. No dogs in any race. I just provide miners with information. I thought that would have been evident from the other posts on the blog and in this thread, though.

I hope by "working hard" you don't mean "working too hard to a preconceived conclusion". I didn't have any. I'd thought that once I had a good look at the data it would be within certain limits that included normal but it didn't, within a 95% confidence range.

Meni Rosenfeld points out that the conclusions could be incorrect, especially I think this statement:


which is a conclusion one cannot come too really given that it's based on a 95% CI.

So at the moment and before I edit the blog post, I'm looking for more p2Pool data from miners in order to try to get a better idea of what's happening.

Finally, the last points of the conclusion are:


which summarise my personal feelings about p2Pool nicely.

I'm not "anti" any pool I blog about, but I find it's more useful to miners in general to analyse a pool where there seems to be a number of miners who are unhappy or have concerns (be they validated or not), rather than one that has happy miners.

@organofcorti Why do you work so hard to provide objective, actionable information to people who would rather bury their head in the sand?

Seriously though, check_status, your comment was completely out of line. OOC has empirically investigated many pools, in many cases he found inadequacies caused by negligence or malice of the operator.

There was a legitimate concern raised about p2pool functioning properly. I learned about it myself some time ago and run some calculations, hoping and expecting to find it well within the acceptable range. What I found was that it is within it, but not well within it.

OOC too was hoping to show how great p2pool is and that there is no problem despite the fear. What he found was that there is weak evidence suggesting a problem. What would you have him do? Hide the information? Lie about it? Or share it so that the relevant people can look into it and possibly fix it (whether it affects the rewards or just the displayed values)? Or even if it is in fact an insolvable problem, being open about it and giving people the chance to make their own decisions in full knowledge of the facts? In fact mechanically presenting the data despite his personal feelings about it is exemplary scientific integrity.

In my day job, whenever I find an inconsistency in our data, people are ecstatic because it means there is a bug that, when fixed, will improve our data considerably. I don't get put down for working hard to show how bad our data is. You should adopt the same mentality.

organofcorti has worked long and hard to show miners the truth and break through misconceptions, not just about p2pool but also about hopping and exploitable payout systems.
I respect and appreciate the work he has done for the Bitcoin community and miners in particular.

I also see organofcorti's work constantly reviewed by Meni Rosenfeld a champion of fair mining and another member of the Bitcoin community I have great respect for.

I do have a "dog in the race" but have no problem being scrutinised. Only those with something to hide would fear it.

Best wishes
Graeme Tee
Ozcoin Pooled Mining Pty Ltd

According to my blog post, the sacrifice is profitability. As I already noted, this statement was stronger than warranted, and I will be changing it to a provable statement at some point soon.

Please provide a link to a post where I flat out say that p2Pool is the least profitable pool.

I guess we both must be in the pay of the Big Pool conglomerates then, huh.

Sigh. I already did. Which part of the blog post didn't you follow? I provide the table of the expected parameters ("Theoretical 1") and experimental statistics for p2Pool here to refresh your memory:



The data I based it on is here:

http://pastebin.com/g2ESh1Uf

Highest PPS payout? More than 100%? If the pool is paying out based on the recorded pool Ghps, then it has paid out 0.91 * PPS so far. If the public data is wrong and the payout based on your local hashrate is in the expected range, then in the long term your local payout will approach PPS.


I'm grateful to anyone who puts time in to reading and understanding my blog. If they can show me a fault in my work, then I'm even more grateful.

Simply implying that I'm "smart" and the analysis "Inteligent BS" is not a constructive criticism. Read the blog and find a mistake that I haven't already owned up to. Otherwise you're just posting "BS". And not very intelligent BS, either.

I am curious about where you got "Round shares" from

Yes I am also glad to see that shares is the basis for the calculations which of course is what you would use (yes I'm stating the obvious) - but it seems that there are those who don't understand this and thus argue about the results due to not using those same results.

My curiosity is simply that the share-chain throws away this information and thus I guess someone must have full logs of the share chain since day one to be able to provide that information.

OK ... not the answer I expected.

hashrate is an estimate based on the number of shares.

Using someone else's calculation then reversing that back to the number of shares is a little risky IMO ...
It assumes that the hashrate was indeed calculated correctly ...

The reason for using the number of shares is that you can't really count shares incorrectly unless you are losing count.
If you aren't counting them correctly, then the hash rate will also be wrong no matter how you calculate it.
You may not have the count, but it you have the count of shares that is certainly better to use than a hashrate estimate converted back to a share count

PPS payout:
86,400 seconds/day * MH/sec 4294.967296 (megahashes/share) * PPS = Payout/day

Finding expected PPS:
Take Payout/day from Alloscomp's calculator for 1000 MH/s and place into Payout/day of PPS payout to solve expected PPS.

To find your Payout per gigahash/s you will need, a pools avg. GH/s for the period your measuring, # of blocks divided by days.

Finding the expected payout:
According to Alloscomp's Bitcoin Calculator: http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php
If the difficulty factor is 1583177.84744, and the MH/s is 1000, then your Payout per GH/s per day is ⊅0.64
This will be the standard measure, the expected value, for comparing miner, pools or network payouts.

Calculating the past 7 day PPS and payout/day for P2pool:

P2pool 7 day average hashrate: 222 GH/s
Previous 7 days total blocks from 6/14-6/20: 23

23 blocks * 50 222 GH/s = 5.18018 7 = 7 day avg. Payout per GH/s or ⊅0.740026 per GH/s per day

P2pool has been performing for the past 7 days 15.6% better than expected.

And that's good news for p2Pool miners, but I couldn't base an analysis on just one week. I based it on all rounds since the start of the pool. On all the pool data available, not just the last week, the pool as a whole has solved 535 blocks with 590.83D shares. That's only 90.5% of expected, or 9.5% worse in your terms.

lol at poll:

Ah, yes, um, well you can select any number of options up to 15, as long as that number is also less than four. Yeah, that's it.

Mods, can we get a poll edit here?