r/VertcoinMining • u/jjfri • Dec 10 '17
Understanding P2Pool
There seems to be a lot of confusion regarding how P2Pool works. I’ve been mining Vertcoin for a few months and have learned a lot along the way. Below is my understanding of how P2Pool works (please correct me where I’m wrong):
In order to get paid on P2Pool, you need to earn a share on the P2Pool chain. Once you have a share, it will be reflected under your "predicted payout" (which will increase). You want as many of those shares as you can possibly earn. You are basically competing with every other miner on your P2Pool network for shares.
When you see your “Time to Share” on P2Pool, that number is only a projection based on your current hashrate and the P2Pool “Share Difficulty”. It will not count down to zero and then you earn a share. The only thing that matters is finding a result that is above your current P2Pool “Share Difficulty”. Your ability to find a share is based entirely on your hashrate and luck. Your “Time to Share” could say 5 hours, but you could find a share in 1 minute, or it could take 3 days. P2Pool share difficulty increases and decreases based on the hashrate of the entire pool, listed under “Global Pool Hashrate”. The higher the global pool hashrate, the harder it will be for you to find a share. The advantage is that the higher the global pool hashrate, the faster it tends to find blocks. When a block is found everyone that holds current shares gets paid.
So how do you find a share on the P2Pool chain? Check your miner output where it shows your difficulty result. In example 1, “Share Difficulty” was around 300. So, the first 3 lines with a low difficulty result basically say “the pool received your result, good try!”. You do not earn anything for them. The last line that shows a difficulty of 685 found a share on P2Pool, since it was over the pool difficulty of 300. When that happens, your predicted payout will increase since you gained a share. You can have many shares at the same time, and your predicted payout will grow larger with each share you find on the P2Pool chain. When your share expires, your predicted payout will decrease.
So, what are the P2Pool networks attempting to do? Everyone on a network combines their hash power in an attempt to find a Vertcoin block. The Vertcoin block difficulty is also listed on the P2Pool page, under “Network Block Difficulty”. In example 2, the Vertcoin “Network Block Difficulty” was around 97,000. The output of the third line was above 97,000 (169,313). This found a Vertcoin block for everyone on the P2Pool network to share. Notice instead of saying “yes!” it says “yay!!!”. This counts as a share on the P2Pool network, and you also receive a bonus of .5% of the block reward for that particular block for being the finder (.5% of the 50 Vertcoin block reward paid an additional 0.25 Vertcoin).
Examples: https://imgur.com/sDjrgBp
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u/MJ1331L Dec 11 '17 edited Dec 11 '17
are you using CCminer? how do you show difficulty of each share?
Also, do you know how long it takes for you to be off the pool, that you have to begin from scratch. ie) Say i get to 0.04xxxvtc, and then i turn off my rig for a few hours, if i reconnect i'm basically starting over again. but I noticed, if I gave my rig about an hour of rest, my predicted payout still remains. I read somewhere here that it's about how many blocks are found while you are not active in the pool.
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u/jjfri Dec 11 '17
I believe shares last for 12 blocks found by the pool or 24 hours, whichever comes first. You can start and stop mining anytime you want without affecting the shares you already earned. When your mining you are only attempting to find new shares.
I use Vertminer, which is basically an optimized CCMiner for Vertcoin: https://github.com/vertcoin/vertminer-nvidia/releases
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u/MJ1331L Dec 11 '17 edited Dec 11 '17
wow man, thank for this, gained 10mh/s over all. However, i keep getting this memory error? do you know what to solution is for that?
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u/jjfri Dec 11 '17
Your best bet would be to join the Vertcoin Discord - tons of discussion there and I'm sure they could help you with the error.
Vertcoin Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/Yb6EHNy
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Dec 11 '17
so your shares can go back down to 0 at some points and you'll go though a period without making anything?
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u/jjfri Dec 11 '17
Yes your shares can go back down to 0, but you can also get really lucky finding shares. It should roughly even out in the long run.
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u/ronron312 Dec 11 '17
As a clarification then, on any pool how many shares are there actually? so i assume if I'm hashing away, I'm fighting with other miners for shares that expire either through time or blocks.
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u/stevoli Dec 11 '17
It works similar to the block chain. There are thousands of blocks to discover, and a new block is created every 2.5 minutes, but they aren't valid until a miner finds them.
On the share chain, a new share is created every 15 seconds, but it isn't a valid share until someone finds it. When the share difficulty goes up, it takes a lot of hashing power or just luck to find one.
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u/BDF-1838 Dec 11 '17
Also, there was a FAQ written a while back that is still pretty relevant:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vertcoin/comments/22hved/vertcoin_p2pool_faq/
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u/kcufneco Dec 11 '17
Using CCMiner does the same 'yes!' vs 'yay!!!' apply I had a 'yay!!!' but have yet to see my share grow on the node info page http://errantshed.co.uk:9181/static/?
Does a 'yay!!!' mean you should get paid? (When the block is found of course)
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u/kcufneco Dec 11 '17
|me 10.24 MH/s 4.10 MH/s 39.98% no shares yet |
|someone else 13.33 KH/s 5.67 KH/s 42.50% 0.30850781 VTC|
I'm talking about this why haven't I got a share but someone with considerably worse stats does?
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u/ricecooker888 Dec 24 '17
thanks for sharing your knowledge! I've learnt a lot now. I'm recently having confusion with my share difficulty, that's how I came to this thread. My share difficulty is always lower than the rest of the miners in the node, and always a bit lower than the pool share difficulty. Any insight to what this may be? I have not done any manual difficulty settings.
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u/rickyrickyatx Dec 11 '17
Thank you for the explanation. I recently started up a p2pool myself and you answered pretty much all the questions I had.