I may sound a little dumb for writing this.... with the p2p pool are you your own "private" pool e.g you keep the entire 25BTC apart from a little fee or is it a very big mining pool and you are supporting the pool by having your own node close to you? Im guess then the 25BTC would be then shared?
Thanks
The 25BTC is shared throughout all of the p2pool network. It's like a distributed pool, where you mine off your own node (or a public node) with the advantages that can give you (zero latency if you run it local to your miners) but you also benefit from sharing hash power with the rest of the p2pool network to reduce variance.