On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Mike Hearn <m...@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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Minimize network downtime and maximize team effectiveness. Reduce network management and security costs.Learn how to hire the most talented Cisco Certified professionals. Visit the Employer Resources Portal http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/employer_resources/index.html _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
