Multi-sharechain support for PLX/MON merged-mining

[MeccupWoland]

Hello!

I am not sure this is an issue, but I don't know how to contact you other way.
Me and other p2pool-n ops need subj very much. As you now, with merged-mining MON and PLX you mine on vertcoin p2p network and other 2 currencies goes solo, so after recent network growth solved blocks on MON/PLX become very rare for p2pool miners. As a result p2pool network hashrate decreases because miners retarget their workers on centralized pools. To avoid this, I think, p2pool must implement multi-sharechain support to allow miners to merge-mine on several p2p networks.
We going to start fundraising on VertcoinMarket to complete this task so I want to ask your advice on how long development may take, reasonable payout for such project or may be is it even possible.
Please respond.

Best regards, Dmitry. meccup@inbox.ru

[donSchoe]

Hi @MeccupWoland - of course this is possible. I know of other p2pool versions which got merged mining implemented. I'm currently maintaining this repository but I'm not able to contribute new code as I'm busy with other projects.

If you are looking for a developer, I suggest putting this issue on bountysource.com and promote it through the affected coins communities. I can review and thest the code and accept a pull request if someone is willing to take over.

I really support such initiatives.

[MeccupWoland]

Would you please tell me what p2pool version have such support so may be we can borrow come code from there?

[donSchoe]

The official p2pool supports merged mining. This should affect all bitcoin-merged-mining coins, SHA256, integrated in this repository:

https://github.com/forrestv/p2pool

[Doom4535]

When you say the official version supports merged mining, do you mean it supports merging multiple p2pool chains (example vtc p2pool chain with --merged pointing to another p2pool share chain for mon? Or is it just solo mining to your mon wallet?)?

[MeccupWoland]

I know about --merged option, but in fact using this option you are mining main network p2pool sharechain and solo GetWorks from currencies networks, specified by --merged. But we need p2pool to support mining on multiple sharechains on several p2pool networks. This is much more difficult task I suppose.

[Doom4535]

That is what I am asking donSchoe,
if the official one does what you're asking I will probably switch.

[donSchoe]

Ok, I never tested merged mining on P2Pool. And I'm not able to implement this currently.
Will accept patches though...

[Doom4535]

Could this feature be implemented by creating a special merged p2pool? Only blocks would be submitted for actual work, but the share submission from the main coin could be used to determine work effort; issue is that someone could probably send a bunch of fake submissions to increase their relative payout. Something would have to be done to prevent this and to ensure that the addresses of all the active miners would be included (like with the current p2pool payout method), rather than having someone connect for the group payout, but submit their own blocks as solo mined.