Here is a list of the most Frequently Asked Questions. If you don't find an answer to your question here, then ask your question in our P2PoolMining Community support forums.
About P2Pool
A group of frequently asked questions relating to p2pool.
P2Pool is a decentralized CryptoCoin mining pool that works by creating a peer-to-peer network of miner nodes.
P2Pool works by creating a new block chain, outside of the crypto currency being mined, in which the difficulty is adjusted so a new block is found every 30 seconds. The blocks that get into the P2Pool block chain (called the “share chain”) are the same blocks that would get into the cryptocoin block chain, only they have a lower difficulty target.
Whenever a peer announces a new share found (new block in the P2Pool block chain), it is received by the other peers in the network, and the other peers verify that this block contains payouts for all the previous miners who found a share (and announced it) that made it into the P2Pool share chain. This continues until some peer finds a block that has a difficulty that meets the cryptocoin network's difficulty target. This peer announces this block to the cryptocoin network and miners who have submitted shares for this block are paid in the generation transaction, proportionally to how many shares they have found in the last while.
More detailed information can be found on the P2Pool Wiki Site – https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool
P2Pool uses the PPLNS payout method.
PPLNS is used to discourage pool hopping. It takes longer to start receiving payouts using PPLNS and it could take several days before you see your first payout but conversely you will continue to see payouts for several days after you stop mining too.
PPLNS – Pay Per Last N Shares. Similar to proportional, but instead of looking at the number of shares in the round, instead looks at the last N shares, regardless of round boundaries.
Mining with P2PoolMining.Us
A group of frequently asked questions about mining with P2PoolMining.Us.
P2Pool miners are paid every time a block is found by the pool for any confirmed shares they currently have in the P2Pool sharechain.
This is known as a Pay Per Last N Shares (PPLNS) payout system, and is the mechanism P2Pool uses to both determine payouts and discourage pool hopping. In P2Pool the N in PPLNS is 8,640 for most coins. Each of the last 8,640 shares are paid each time a block is found. A share in the P2Pool sharechain can be expected to last between 1 to 3 days depending on the coin.
Confirmed shares are valid, and paid whenever a block is found, for as long as they remain in the sharechain. Payouts in P2Pool are made immediately, directly from the block generation transaction. All payouts are paid directly into your wallet which you have designated as your miners UserID. Payouts are paid each time a block is found by the P2Pool network.
As a miner on P2Pool you are competing with other P2Pool miners for a portion of the 8,640 active shares. The more shares (and the higher the difficulty of those shares) you have in the sharechain, the greater your reward when a block is found.
It's easy to get started with mining on the P2PoolMining network.
Just choose the coin that you want to mine, input the pools stratum+tcp address, your wallet, and password into your mining software and set back and enjoy the ride. If you are new to mining and all of this sounds foreign to you then you will want to read our blog posts for getting started with cryptocoin mining.
We recommend that you create a new wallet address for your miner and then mine to that new address. In this way you will be able to track exactly how many coins are being generated from your mining efforts. By using a new address, you will be able to see the accumulated payouts over time without erroneous transactions interfering with the Total calculated profits.
In addition, on the P2Pool “Active Miners On This Node” screen for each of our pools, you can click on the icons next to your miner address to see the payout history of your miner.
The fee's on P2Pools are a bit different than other pools.
Any fees that a P2Pool has is probabilistic. In other words, if the P2Pool node has a 1% fee then 1% of the shares go to the pool, not 1% of every share. The pool can have periods of bad luck in relation to the fee and get nothing at all…but it averages out over time.
We charge a nominal 0.5% fee on our P2PoolMining.Us nodes… This means that we get 0.5% of the shares generated from our pools.
If this fee sounds high to you, consider this – you are paying us a little more $0.01 cents for each dollar you make in mining.
This fee covers hosting fees, software updates, and administrative staff which ensure our pools are available for you 24 hours a day/7 days a week.
Performance Improvements for Miners on P2Pools
A group of frequently asked questions about improving individual miner performance on P2Pool pools.
On average a miner on a classic pool needs to react to a new coinbase every 10 minutes. Every 10 minutes a miner on any pool can submit a share based on a block that isn't the last one anymore. This is wasted effort: it doesn't help generate the next block in the chain and the pool suffers from this. Most pools reject such work and ignore it when they compute miners' rewards.
Miners are often separated from their pools by long-distance networks with tens or hundreds of milliseconds of latency. This means that every 10 minutes a miner on a normal pool is wasting its efforts for at least tens or hundreds of milliseconds. This is why there are rejects even on properly tuned classic setups: for 10ms of latency between miner and pool on average you should expect 0.01/(60*10) = 0.0016%:
| Latency | Expected Rejects |
| 10ms | 0.0016% |
| 100ms | 0.016% |
| 1s | 0.16% |
Conclusion: on a traditional pool, relatively high latencies aren't such a big deal.
On P2Pool, the tracking of the proof of work is implemented by a sharechain which mirrors several properties of the coin's blockchain:
- A share is a proof of work with a given difficulty
- A share uses the previous share in its input to make a sharechain like blocks do to build the blockchain
- It builds on a block template given by a crypto-coin node: a share hitting the crypto-coin's difficulty can become a block too
- It's difficulty is dynamically adjusted to maintain a fixed average rate of share generation (one every 30 seconds)
The last point means that having a low latency is more important for a P2Pool miner than a miner on a traditional pool. Pay attention to the fact that a share being submitted too late to enter the sharechain can still produce a block so it's not wasted work (high reject rates are not a problem for global income on P2Pool unlike rejects on traditional pools). This said as the rejected share isn't in the sharechain it won't count as a proof of work for the purpose of distributing the pool's income.
The important thing is: high latencies don't hurt the pool's income but they hurt the miner's income.
Pool Node Listing
A group of frequently asked question about the P2Pool Node Listing showing DASH nodes around the world.
There is nothing, that you as a P2Pool Node operator must do, to get your node added to our node listing.
Getting your P2Pool Node listed happens automatically, provided that your node meets the following criteria;
- Your Node must be up and running for at least 24 hours
- Your node must be available to the public via a public IPv4 address
- Your node must respond to a standard URL request (http://YourIPAddress:7903/fee)
- Your nodes latency from Chicago, USA must be below ~5 Second response time
Our script reads your DASH address from the DASHD daemon address file.
Each day at 8:00 AM GMT-0500, our script executes, utilizing the list of known DASH addresses, processing a /fee request for nodes in the address file. If we get a response from your node, the node is GEO-coded and added to our listing. As long as your node is running and both In/Out node peers are able to connect to your node, then your nodes IP Address will appear in the DASHD address file.
If after 48 hours, your P2Pool node has still not appeared in our listing. Double check the requirements from the list above and ensure your node is configured appropriately.
Our P2Pool Node list is designed to make it easy for viewers to find the BEST P2Pool Node for their Mining efforts.
Here are a few lesser known features of our P2Pool Node list;
- You can click on any of the column headers and the data in the listing will be sorted by that column
- You can toggle thru column sorting (by Ascending/Descending order) just by clicking multiple times on the column header
- The PING column shows the ping times to the selected P2Pool node based on your location
- You can click on the GWTL “Check” for any given node, to see the Get Work Latency to the node from your location
You can use the node list to find the best performing P2Pool for your geographic area.
NOTE – be sure to check our FAQ about Performance Improvements which can help you to determine the best node for your miner.
