First of all, what is P2Pool?
P2Pool is one huge, peer-to-peer pool based on the original coin protocol.
How does it work?
Miners connect to "Nodes" and all of the P2Pool "Nodes" connect to each other, forming one big pool.
What are the advantages?
Your mined coins will be deposited directly into your wallet, they are never held by any pool "operator" and cannot be lost due to incompetence or fraudulent behavior.
You will get better rewards: P2Pools award transaction fees from black rewards to the miners.
P2Pool is DDoS resistant, it is impossible to DDoS the entire peer-to-peer P2Pool network, at best all someone can do is knock a node offline, in which case your client will just switch to one of your failover nodes.
You do not have to register on any pool sites, etc. all you need is a Vertcoin address which you will use as your username, and your rewards will be paid directly into your wallet.
Most P2Pool nodes have <1% fees, and if you want 0% fees, you can even set up your own node on your local network.
Even if the node you are using goes down, you will not lose a single micro payment, as the network itself stores your pending rewards, and will distribute them to you as normal.
Are there any disadvantages?
It's not really a disadvantage, but it takes longer for you to receive useable coins as they have to mature in the blockchain before they can be awarded to you. Don't panic if you don't receive your rewards quickly, they will arrive!
Here's a few bits of info you should know about P2Pool before you start looking for nodes:
It is normal to receive high rejection rates on P2Pool, P2Pool generates work a lot faster than regular pools and as a result you are going to end up with stale shares. All you need to do is ensure your current Reject % is equal to or lower than the P2Pool network average. (currently 24% rejects is the average). Having a reject rate lower than the average will allow you to profit off of other people's rejected shares. (Even more rewards, yay!)
Your latency to your node matters a lot. High latency means you will have a higher reject rate. When you're looking for nodes you want to ensure that your ping is low.
If you connect to a node with no miners currently using it (or a very small number) you will receive massive numbers of HW errors. Don't panic! This is because when a node first starts up, it sets the share difficulty to 0, after 1-2 minutes it will auto-adjust and you will stop receiving HW errors.
My dedicated EU P2Pool node:
http://2.229.0.184:22550/static/ Connection settings :
cgminer --scrypt -o stratum+tcp://2.229.0.184:22550/ -u YourAuroracoinAddress -p x --expiry 1 --scan-time 1 --queue 0
no registration required!
Features:
PPNLS payout
Low 1% fee
Super fast servers
