P2Pool to hardfork on March 18th at 21:00 UTC

sech1¹ has announced² that P2Pool³ (both main and mini) will hardfork to new consensus rules on March 18th at 21:00 UTC:

The hardfork is necessary to improve P2Pool scalability and reduce the impact on Monero blockchain. You’ll need to update to P2Pool v3.0 or newer version before this time.

Schedule

January (2nd half) - Testnet
January 31 - P2Pool v3.0 binaries
February (TBD) - Monero GUI v0.18.2.0 and Gupax with P2Pool v3.0
March 18 - P2Pool HF

Changes overview

• Dynamic PPLNS window (from fixed 2160 blocks (~6 hours) to a dynamic cap)⁴
• Duplicate share IDs fix⁵
• New transaction generation algorithm⁶’⁷

The network upgrade should address the issue with P2Pool spamming too many outputs to the blockchain, which currently reduces effective ring size for everyone using Monero, down to 12-13 decoys instead of 16.

To better understand the issue, consult the relevant MRL discussions on Github⁸’⁹ and run Rucknium’s P2Pool coinbase outputs analysis R script file¹⁰.

The updated codebase can be inspected in the P2Pool hardfork¹¹ branch.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.

Update 23/1/31: P2Pool v3.0 is out¹²; make sure to update before March 18th.

Update 23/3/18: sech1 reported HF was successful¹³.