Are there any decentralized mining pools available for ethereum? Something like p2pool which fully decentralizes the mining process and reward distribution?
Is this possible?
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2 Answers
There were some ideas on reddit regarding p2pool for Ethereum. If one follows the same principle as P2Pool for Bitcoin, which is an alternative blockchain with shorter block times, it can be seen that such model would hardly work on Ethereum, because the block times are already pretty short.
Another idea is to organise a pool as a contract. This however, is very tricky technically, because shares submitted by the miners would need to be communicated in the transactions (the only way to pass information to the contracts). The contract would need to verify the shares, and, unfortunately, EtHash verification implemented in Ethereum VM op-codes would consume quite a lot of gas. That means that miners will have to keep spending ether on submitting shares. So such pool mining would not be profitable, and miners will simply prefer ordinary, "centralised" mining.
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1Even the current "Ethereum pools" have the huge disadvantage of adding latency into the already short block time. (Imagine taking a 10% hit on your profit just because you want to see constant profit instead of sporadic blocks being mined.)– linageeJan 24, 2016 at 20:17
There is currently no p2pool available for Ethereum due to various reasons, e.g. very short block times or the inability to create transactions with multiple outputs.
There are approaches to decentralize at least the mining effort back to the clients nodes. This is possible because you can specify the etherebase in your client to match the pools etherbase. Therefore the payout remains centralized.
But the local mining at least eleminates the latency in communication with the remote pool as the blocks are solved locally.
One example of that implementation is talkether.