With 500MHs/s your average reward should be around 0.04BTC per block found. You can pack several inputs in a transaction with a 0.0005 BTC fee so your loss from fees is less than 1% when you use p2pool mined coins.
So if the alternative is a pool with more than 1% fees you're automatically better off with p2pool.
Currently the fees earned by block mining are around 1-2%, so if the alternatives don't pay you network fees, that's more you lose vs p2pool.
And lastly, my 2 months performance on p2pool is 107,5% vs expected 100%PPS so p2pool seems to have a higher than average reward than most pools. I didn't even count some small downtimes in that period so it's a low estimate. This matches what
http://p2pool.info/ reports: constant higher luck.
One explanation may be that p2pool is by its nature better connected to the bitcoin network than most pools: all P2Pool nodes quickly broadcast a p2pool found block on the bitcoin network which may lower orphan rate.
p2pool's luck is just that: luck. The smaller the pool size, the more varied that is. 90 days is hardly enough time for measuring it given it makes up less than 3% of the network. For almost a year the p2pool luck was abysmal and anybody using it would've been better off with any decent sized pool.
That's a very helpful explanation.
So at 4 Bit Cents per block my 13 BTC example would have 325 inputs. Would that really be only a 0.0005 BTC fee?
Does anyone have a real world example?
Thanks,
Sam
It's hard to give a real world example, but you'll have a very hard time ever sending 13 BTC with 325 different inputs. In that kind of situation, you'd be better off sending your inputs into a separate wallet with larger chunks (keeping the transactions small while doing so). Do that a few times, then wait for those to mature, then use those to make even larger chunks (keeping transaction size small while doing so) again once they've matured enough to not require a fee. Note: This will not work if your initial inputs aren't big/old enough to avoid transaction fees. Each 0.04 input would have to be 25 days (I think) old prior to being merged.
The "bag of pennies" scenario is a significant problem for small miners on p2pool. Not so bad for larger ones. But the larger p2pool becomes, the worse this problem is. It's a hidden fee for using p2pool. You get your money faster than some pools, though there are many pools that don't require waiting for blocks to mature (or PPS where you don't even have to wait for a block). However, the larger p2pool becomes, the more frequently you'll be forced to pay txfees when spending coins.
p2pool's concept is great, but the payment method and share chain prevent it from becoming a major "pool". Unless it gets turned into a series of supernodes which people mine through, which would end up being worse than the current pool system due to high stale rates using a remote node that has longpolls every 10 seconds.