Tari Merge Mining FAQ - shermand100/PiNodeXMR GitHub Wiki
Context for the Tari Merge Mining development,
tldr: PiNodeXMR recommends you build P2Pool with merge mining donations enabled to support the P2Pool development. It costs you nothing, and remember P2Pool runs with 0% fee, so it's a bit of thanks for #SChernykh work.
quoted from the developer of P2Pool:
Greetings all P2Pool miners!
You may have noticed that P2Pool development activity stalled in the last few months. It happened due to a multitude of reasons. One of them is that the donations basically stopped - last donation I received for P2Pool was on Feb 19th, almost 3 months ago.
P2Pool is an open-source and free to use project, it doesn't have a dev fee, so I kept developing it purely on my enthusiasm.
There will be a need to intensify development in the following months due to merge mining, Monero FCMP++s, RandomX v2 and other things that will need to be done.
To give me more incentive to do it, I decided to introduce merge mining donations in the next P2Pool release (v4.6).
What does it mean? It means, that if you're mining on P2Pool and update to v4.6 or a newer version, and you're not merge mining Tari already, your node will be receiving merge mining tasks that will go to my Tari donation wallet.
**FAQ**
* Will it affect my XMR payouts?
No. P2Pool will keep mining to your XMR wallet 100% of the time. It's still 0% fee on XMR.
* I'm already merge mining Tari. Will it affect my Tari payouts?
No. P2Pool will ignore merge mining donation jobs if you're already merge mining Tari. It is 0% fee on Tari if you're mining it.
* Will it put an additional load on my CPU, reducing my hashrate?
No. Merge mining donation messages are very lightweight to process, and Monero block template update code has only a few lines to modify the merge mining data appropriately.
* Will P2Pool connect to some donation server? I don't want P2Pool to be "phoning home" for any reason.
No. Merge mining donation messages will be sent through P2Pool network, there is no need for a centralized server to send them.
* I still want to opt out of it, how to do it?
To opt out of it, either build P2Pool with -DWITH_MERGE_MINING_DONATION=OFF in cmake command line, or start merge mining Tari to your wallet (P2Pool will not mine to a Tari donation wallet then).
* Will it be necessary for miners to run the Tari node and wallet for the merge mining donations to work?
No, Tari node is not required for this. All required data for merge mining is sent through the P2Pool network (it's only a few 32-byte hashes to be added to the merge mining data).
A further snippet of context also on P2Pool github: https://github.com/SChernykh/p2pool/blob/v4.6/README.md#donations
So with that said, here at PiNodeXMR we support this decision. It's fair, transparent, and solves the funding issue of a core developer.
We always give you, the end user, final say of what runs on your device. So you can disable this merge mining donation option when you perform the P2Pool install/update. Selecting DISABLE will add the '-DWITH_MERGE_MINING_DONATION=OFF' command to the cmake build.
It can later be re-enabled/disabled by performing a force update.
PiNodeXMR at present plans to remain a 100% Monero project and so adding the Tari node software enabling you to merge mine yourself is not on my horizon.