How does P2Pool pay out when I find a share in the sidechain?

Finding a P2Pool share does not trigger an immediate payment. It gives you a place in P2Pool’s recent-work payout window, and you receive XMR directly when the pool finds a Monero block while your share is eligible.

What your sidechain share represents

A share is proof that your miner has done useful work. It meets P2Pool’s easier mining target, but it usually does not meet the much harder target needed to create a Monero block.

P2Pool records accepted shares on its sidechain—a separate chain that tracks miners’ work for payout purposes. Your share ties that work to your mining wallet address.

You may also see “accepted shares” in your mining software. Those can be lower-difficulty submissions used to track your miner’s speed. They are not necessarily sidechain shares that qualify you for payments. Check your P2Pool node’s output or statistics to confirm that you found an actual sidechain share.

When that share earns you XMR

P2Pool uses PPLNS, short for “Pay Per Last N Shares.” In everyday terms, it divides each block reward among miners whose qualifying shares are in a moving window of recent work.

Here is the sequence:

• You find a share that qualifies for the sidechain.
• Your share becomes eligible in the payout window.
• If your P2Pool sidechain finds a Monero block during that eligibility period, you receive your share of its reward.
• Once your share leaves the window, it no longer earns from later blocks.

One share can earn several payments—or none. If the pool finds several Monero blocks while it is eligible, it can contribute to each payment. If the pool finds no blocks during that time, that share earns nothing.

You do not have to keep your miner online for an already-recorded share to remain eligible. Stopping simply means you stop adding new work to the window.

How your payment amount is worked out

Your payment depends on your eligible work compared with everyone else’s eligible work in that window. P2Pool accounts for the shares’ difficulty, meaning how hard they were to find, rather than promising a fixed amount for each share.

For a simplified example, if your eligible work represents 1% of the window’s total, you receive roughly 1% of the reward distributed for that block.

Monero’s base block reward is 0.6 XMR under its ongoing tail emission, with transaction fees also contributing to block rewards. Your actual payout varies with the eligible work and the block reward. There is no guaranteed XMR value attached to a newly found share.

Where the payment goes

P2Pool puts your payment directly into the Monero block’s reward transaction. There is no pool operator holding a balance for you, and you do not request a withdrawal or wait to reach a conventional pool payout threshold.

Because this is newly mined XMR, it stays locked for 60 blocks, roughly two hours at Monero’s average two-minute block time. Your synced wallet may show it before you can spend it. Only blocks that remain in Monero’s accepted chain produce lasting rewards.

The bottom line

Your sidechain share buys no guaranteed payout: it records your eligibility for upcoming block rewards. Watch for both your share entering the payout window and your P2Pool sidechain finding Monero blocks while it remains there.