Author: Gregory Maxwell 2013-04-05 10:02:11
Published on: 2013-04-05T10:02:11+00:00
In a message thread from April 5, 2013, Mike Hearn expressed his belief that p2pool had not been growing for a long time and had issues dealing with FPGA/ASIC hardware. However, another member of the thread clarified that P2pool worked well with FPGAs and was being used by one of the largest FPGA farms. The issue was with BFL FPGA miners and Avalon's latency. P2pool uses a 10-second sharechain to provide low variance, but several-second miners end up subsidizing faster p2pool users. P2pool was stable with the network until ASICminer came online mining on BTCguild and the first Avalons started shipping. The network increased by 10TH in a couple of weeks (now 15TH) while P2Pool remained mostly constant. ForrestV, the author and maintainer of the P2pool software, would like to make Avalon and other high latency devices first-class supported on P2Pool, but he does not have one. People who own them are not eager to fuss around with a 5BTC/day revenue stream, especially since the Avalon firmware has quirks and bugs that are still being worked out. The thread concluded with a comment about supporting people who work on infrastructure and ensuring they have what they need to keep providing free services. The community often assumes they are super-rich Bitcoin old hands, but this is often not true. Overall, the discussion provided insights into the challenges faced by P2pool and the desire to support those who contribute to the Bitcoin infrastructure.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T16:42:37.048334+00:00