Frowned upon by whom? There is no pool operator to whom you would be paying fees.
The p2pool community. Last I checked default was 1.5% maybe 2%, I forget. It's been a while.
Very few pools pay transaction fees, merged mine for the benefit of the miner, and don't charge a fee. It costs money to run a pool, where do you think that money comes from?
Every one I've seen does. Granted I haven't looked in a while.
The money comes from pool fees.
You don't know with certainty who is untrustworthy until after they have been discovered to be untrustworthy (or incompetent). As you say the risk of being cheated is there, so the "expected" earnings are lower, even if the adverse event hasn't happened yet.
The majority that were here 2 years ago are still here. Those that have proven themselves worthy have a big slice of the pie (BTC Guild..)
The higher expected earnings come from the combination of no fees, paying tx fees, merged mining, reduced orphan risk with p2pool, and no risk of cheating by the pool operator.
Merged mining? The average person can not successfully solo merge mine.
IXcoin difficulty: 750million
DevCoin difficulty: 972million
NameCoin difficulty: 1.5billion
Even if they could, conventional pools merge mine as well ... certainly no advantage there.
For reference, I'm using BTC Guild. I get tx fees, I have NMC merged mining (ixc/dvc are worthless), and am paid for orphans.
It doesn't really work that way. 80% of the time your share will be accepted! All this means is that instead of a 4 day average time (if that is the number), you have a 5 day average share time.
Um, if average time to share is 4 days ... then it's 4 days. No exceptions for getting a reject.
These rejects don't mean the same thing. If the pool average is 19% (I didn't realize it was that high) and your reject rate is 19% then you haven't lost any earnings at all. You are on par with all the other pool members so when it comes time to divide up the blocks you will get your proportional share.
You're comparing with others in p2pool. I'm comparing with non p2pool.
M
EDIT: added difficulties and BTC Guild info.