I was on a pool, (name withheld to not cause a flame war) and was paying a 2.5% fee. Researched solo mining, and that was not a good fit. Ran across a P2P Pool idea, where it is decentralized. You probably already know about it but I am new to this. I followed the instructions here and created a "node":
http://doges.org/index.php/topic,5586.0.html and it went smoothly except for a typo on my part which drove me crazy looking over my work. Running it under VirtualBox so I can sandbox it and test, and revert to snapshots when I mess it up!
Can't testify to Hash Rates or if it is stable, but I am mining with just myself, pointing to my payout address and getting shares in my wallet. Kind of cool to see it as "Mined" instead of "Received with" from a pool. Not sure how the performance will compare to a typical pool.
Apparently you can allow people to join your node. I haven't tested it to see if my internet connection can take it, but anyone is welcome to try. If it gets crazy I can turn it off or get a bigger pipe. What I like about it is you can connect to someone that is close to you or create your own node (I am in Fort Worth, TX). Set it up this morning, so I will see. Running for about 3.5 hours and have 322 shares on a 3.64 Mh/s rig. Anxious to see what it does in a week.
If you want to test it, I have it set for .5% (didn't think anything higher was fair, and may lower it. I just wanted to see if it paid the fees for my test.)
The instructions create a "Front end for the node"
http://doge.joinaparty.com:22550 so you can see how it looks. Kinda of different from a standard pool. Probably should create a landing page for
http://doge.joinaparty.com with instructions to everything.
Pulled these connect strings that you can try and connect I use sgminer:
cgminer --scrypt -o doge.joinaparty.com:22550 -u YOURDOGEPAYOUTADDRESS -p anypassword
bfgminer --scrypt -o doge.joinaparty.com:22550 -u YOURDOGEPAYOUTADDRESS -p anypasssword
Don't count on this being a forever node to connect to, I am just testing it and if two people connect it might even bring it to it's knees!
Do me a favor and connect so I can test and then go create your own node! If it works out, who knows.
Thanks!
DaZ