Events such as this are announced via the P2Pool-notifications mailing list.
P2Pool is a decentralized Bitcoin mining pool that works by creating a peer-to-peer network of miner nodes.
As opposed to usual pools, P2Pool helps to secure Bitcoin against double-spending and 51% attacks. P2Pool's initial setup requires a little more effort but provides equivalent payouts with a higher variance and no need for trust in a pool operator.
WindowsDownload the newest version from the Windows binaries: p2pool_win32_15.0.zip .sig
You can also download the source as tar/zipballs on GitHub.
LinuxUsing git is preferable, but you can also download tar/zipballs on GitHub.
sudo apt-get install git # if git is not installed git clone https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool.git cd p2pool make
The following packages are required, and will be automatically installed when you run 'make':
If for whatever reason you need to install them manually:
sudo apt-get install python-twisted python-argparse # should work on Ubuntu
Mac OS XUsing git is preferable, but you can also download tar/zipballs on GitHub.
You can download git for OS X from the official Git site, or install it with Homebrew:
brew install git
Then download and install p2pool:
git clone https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool.git cd p2pool
The following packages are required, and will be automatically installed when you run 'make':
Setting up a working P2Pool mostly consists of:
Download and install Bitcoin-Qt or bitcoind. Initial synchronization will likely take more than a day to complete. For this reason, it is generally a good idea to complete this step in advance.
Insert the following text into bitcoin.conf and restart Bitcoin-Qt or bitcoind:
server=1
rpcuser=bitcoinrpc
rpcpassword=(random data)
Download P2Pool and execute run_p2pool.exe (Windows) or 'python run_p2pool.py' (Linux/OS X/source).
P2Pool will start downloading the sharechain, displaying sections like this occasionally:
2014-01-09 17:15:45.075550 P2Pool: 0 shares in chain (0 verified/3133 total) Peers: 5 (0 incoming) 2014-01-09 17:15:45.075662 Local: 0H/s in last 0.0 seconds Local dead on arrival: ??? Expected time to share: ???
Within a few minutes, it should start showing sections like this (notice the pool hashrate - Pool: 115TH/s - is now shown), indicating that the sharechain has finished downloading. As you can see from the timestamps, here it took about one and a half minutes. It will vary depending on your CPU speed and Internet bandwidth.
2014-01-09 17:16:49.525335 P2Pool: 8698 shares in chain (57 verified/8698 total) Peers: 5 (0 incoming) 2014-01-09 17:16:49.525422 Local: 0H/s in last 0.0 seconds Local dead on arrival: ??? Expected time to share: ??? 2014-01-09 17:16:49.525476 Shares: 0 (0 orphan, 0 dead) Stale rate: ??? Efficiency: ??? Current payout: 0.0000 BTC 2014-01-09 17:16:49.525510 Pool: 115TH/s Stale rate: 12.4% Expected time to block: 14.7 hours
Just point miners to http://HOST:9332/ with HOST being the IP address of the computer running P2Pool. The username can be your payout Bitcoin address or anything that describes the miner if you prefer to mine into your Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind wallet. Use any password; it is ignored by P2Pool. When mining on the same machine, you can use 127.0.0.1 as the P2Pool host.
Unless your miners have Bitcoin addresses as usernames, payouts will go to Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind's wallet. You can look at P2Pool's web interface, which has statistics and graphs, by going to http://YOUR_P2POOL_HOST:9332/ in a browser - http://127.0.0.1:9332/ if you're looking at this tutorial on the same host that P2Pool is running.
Once your P2Pool setup is working, make sure to subscribe to the P2Pool notifications mailing list to receive urgent pool status updates.
By default, P2Pool receives 1% to fund P2Pool's development. This fee is optional, but very welcome and useful.
Payouts should be the same as other pools with a higher variance (payouts are inconsistently smaller or larger days after days). Payouts can even be slightly higher because blocks propagation time is sometime faster on P2Pool. It also happens that people are sending bitcoins to P2Pool miners to encourage miners to support P2Pool.
Miners' payouts are not affected so long as they have a proportional number of rejected shares to other miners. A new share is found every 30 seconds on average with P2Pool's sharechain. This means reorganizations happen more often and miners must have a good network connection in order to receive last shares within a short time.
You should go through the same steps as if you were mining with Bitcoin, except that you should:
Thanks to the Bitcoin Foundation for its generous support of P2Pool.
Thanks to the Litecoin Project for its generous donations to P2Pool.
