If you are talking about the rewards, give it at least 6 months, both of them will have more or less the same payout for the last 6 months. Most normal pools have fees which can result in p2pool having more payout. They also have email notifications which alerts the user if the hashrate falls below X.
Is there any reward for the P2Pool owner ?
Some of them run it for free for others. Some people set up their own nodes and mine it on their own node as it have less latency and traffic.
So, unless a P2Pool owner has his own mining equipment, he's not gonna profit from this ...right ? Because, like a normal pool owner, he cant charge ...is not it ?
Unless you impose a fee and people are still interested to join it which is unlikely.
Is it possible at all to impose a fee on mining payout for a P2Pool ?
Yes, if you run this command,
screen -d -m -S btcp2pool ~/p2pool/run_p2pool.py (username) (Bitcoind password)
It will automatically donate a small amount of the miner's revenue to you.
That is incorrect. If you run your p2pool node as you describe, your node will donate 1% of the earnings to the author of p2pool. If you want to charge a fee for miners to use your node, you need to add the -f argument. Example:
./run_p2pool.py -f 1.0
This will charge people who mine on your node 1% as well as donate 1% to the author of p2pool. You can set the percentage to whatever you want (up to 100). If you want to change how much you donate to the author, you can do that with the --give-author command.
You can most certainly merge-mine on p2pool. As of now, you can mine NMC, DVC, IXC, I0C, FSC, HUC along with BTC on a p2pool node. Your node's hashing power is combined and used to try and solve blocks for each of those coins. The difference between schemes like those at GHash, Eligius, BTCGuild is that those pools pay the miners, whereas p2pool pays the node. If you want to pay your miners proceeds from merged-mined coins, you'll have to do so manually as they will not be automatically paid.
There is a very nice comparison thread showing earnings from p2pool, Eligius and BTCGuild here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/benchmark-p2pool-vs-btcguild-vs-eligius-416933One of the nice features of p2pool is the ability to donate - and surprisingly, people do indeed donate. That is one advantage over mining the other pools.
