P2Pool, an open-source, decentralized, mining pool, has called for a hardfork upgrade in 24 hours to be compatible with a BIP66/block version 3. The upgrade is needed under P2Pool release 14.0. BIP66 will take effect in about two and a half days as of June 26, according to the Bitcointalk.org  P2Pool discussion thread.

Users must upgrade in order for P2Pool to continue working without producing invalid blocks.

Upgrade Warning Coming

At 50% of P2PPool’s hashrate upgrading, P2Pool instances will start displaying a warning saying that an upgrade is required. “Reaching that point as quickly as possible is very important. And then, at 95%, users that have not upgraded will be excluded. If non-upgraded users aren’t excluded before BIP66 takes effect, P2Pool users will be subject to paying other users for invalid work – effectively a withholding attack,” the posting noted.

“So, please upgrade to 14.0 now and tell everyone else to also.”

Users noted on Bitcointalk.org that the system is working.

Some users said an error message on their node relating to the daemon operating system. The support team responded that error messages on daemon indicates some problems on daemon, not P2Pool. P2Pool is merely showing this in the log.

Mining Activity Steady

A posting yesterday on Bitcointalk.org said that not many blocks were being solved by P2Pool. Support responded: “We’re currently in a little streak of bad luck but the past few weeks leading up have been pretty good. Still, total luck has been around or over 100 for the past couple months. Seems we are hovering consistently between 260-280 miners for a while now, but there have been several new faces coming into the thread working on new nodes which has been good.”

P2Pool cited BIP66 compatibility as the most important change since 13.4.

There have been a lot of changes since 13.4, but the most important one is BIP66 compatibility, which was what the most recent changes consisted of. Most other things were minor internal cleanups, but a few external pull requests were merged that might be useful, namely midnightmagic’s dynamic address cycling support.