I've been with P2Pool since April 5, and have had 8 payouts so far. Each successive payout has been more than the previous one. Is this what's meant that P2Pool is resistant to pool hopping, or is the fact that my payouts are monotonically increasing just a coincidence? (There have been decreasing numbers of P2Pool miners, thus making the payouts larger for those who stick with P2Pool.)
The more shares you have in the chain, the higher your payout. That could be because of better luck, or the fact that hashrate has been leaving (or both), thus you are able to get more shares that way.Nothing is "hop-proof". But, in this case PPLNS is the next best thing. By design there's a ramp-up period (3 days in this case) where you don't reach full block payout potential until after you've been mining for 3 days. If you know you've got to put in that much work before you see your "proper" payouts, you're less likely to leave in-between to seek luck elsewhere, lest you've lost most of your past 3 days' worth of work.
From April 5th to April 8th you would have seen payouts increasing since that was your ramp-up period. Then in the past 12 days we've gone from 304 miners (4/8) down to 267 miners with the most recent block today (woo, another one 2 hours ago!), so in theory you would see earnings increase there as well since there are less shares from the other miners competing with yours.
