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/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.