I pay 3% at BTC Guild. I get paid for orphans, I get merged mining with NMC (impossible on p2pool solo), extremely low variance, 0.2% stales, and transaction fees.
You're going to have a hard time convincing me p2pool is better than that.
M
I don't want to convince you, because we value the benefit of mining differently.
Especially the decentralization and variance part.
I'm not following how you value increased variance. Most people consider variance to be a bad thing.
Decentralization I can understand and agree with. If I had the hashpower so that the current almost 1 million share difficulty didn't cause huge variance (or p2pool was changed so share difficulty didn't effectively lock out low end miners), and I could run p2pool locally, I would be a p2pool miner (again) as well. Using a public node defeats the whole purpose of decentralization.
M
More hashpower is never going to reduce the variance compared to other pools. You may get more shares on p2pool with more hashpower, but you will also get more shares on the other pools with same amount of hashes. So I imagine you would still complain about "variance" even if you had more hashpower. Shares on p2pool are far more valuable than other pools. So in the long term, all other things being equal, it should be a wash, luck playing a big part. The p2pool difficulty is reflected in the time it takes to generate a p2pool block. The target being 10 seconds I believe. The only way to reduce difficulty is to reduce this target time of 10 seconds (or reduce the total hashpower in the pool). Reducing target time would have other consequences that I'm not sure you would be pleased with. The effects of latency are already high. Reducing target time would magnify those, if I understand correctly. The sensitivity to latencies maybe the underlying cause behind your earlier comment, "p2pool can not be reliably run on a home DSL connection". Which is not true, at least for me. Anyhoo, sounds to me like having a constant trickle of payout no matter how small, is important to you. I would suggest BTCGiuld is the right place for your hashes.