Recently I built a self-made bitcoin mining software in python for pure learning purposes. At the moment I've used python just because I'm still more familiar with that language. I'm planning now to switch it into C++ in the effort of making the code more efficient (the idea is also to create a public repository on GitHub to make the code available to anyone and improvable by the community of developers).
During the process of development I got the opportunity to think again and again about the importance of mining (other than earning Bitcoin at a 'good price'). We all know that the activity of mining is beneficial for decreasing the risk of a 51% attack. Consequently we should also be aware about the risk to have most of the mining power concentrated in the hands of few centralized mining pools. It seems that this is exactly what is happening today.
Decentralization is key. Bitcoin has been created for plebs!
Therefore I explored the web in the search of open source projects building peer-2-peer mining pools. After finding some recent not truly decentralized projects, I went through this old repository
This is an old project, born in 2011, based on this idea:
P2Pool creates a new block chain in which the difficulty is adjusted so a new block is found every 30 seconds. The blocks that get into the P2Pool block chain (called the "share chain") are the same blocks that would get into the Bitcoin block chain, only they have a lower difficulty target. Whenever a peer announces a new share found (new block in the P2Pool block chain), it is received by the other peers, and the other peers verify that this block contains payouts for all the previous miners who found a share (and announced it) that made it into the P2Pool share chain. This continues until some peer finds a block that has a difficulty that meets the Bitcoin network's difficulty target. This peer announces this block to the Bitcoin network and miners who have submitted shares for this block are paid in the generation transaction, proportionally to how many shares they have found in the last while. - Unknown author
This concept sounds great to me. It sounds like a great way to add hashing power in a pure decentralized way.
However, for some reason that I don't know, seven years ago, that software stopped being updated. I'd love to study it with the idea of refurbishing it or even starting a new open source project.
Does anyone of you know something about this project and why it suddenly stopped being updated?
What are your thoughts about the above mentioned idea?