Quote from: radi324 on February 25, 2014, 09:10:29 PM

Quote from: Radiostatic on February 25, 2014, 09:05:07 PM

Quote from: heyho on February 25, 2014, 09:00:44 PM

Want to clarify how p2pool works - for those who wonder why they don't get payouts.
In p2pool there is such thing like "minimal paid share difficulty". Its value depends on overall pool rate and it changes quite often.
Only shares with difficulty above this minimum will be paid. All other shares are just for calculating your hashrate and basically don't affect you payout.
Currently minimal difficulty on black coin p2pool is 0.08 - this means that paid shares are those which have diff above 0.08*65536, i.e. 5242.

Another thing to take into account is that p2pool works on PPLNS system. When pool finds block it pays only for X last shares submitted to it from all user, not for all shares since last block. This mean that you shall be lucky enough to have your share in this "window" of X shares.
More detailed info is here: http://pool-x.eu/aboutpplns

Summary: in order to get payout for particular block you shall have at least one paid share submitted during pool's round window. This might be problematically for miners with low hashrate when p2pool becomes large (and therefore paid share diff increases) - they might consider jumping to regular pools.

And one more: all p2pool nodes posted here are part of single p2pool and there is no any difference where you mine your coins. The only thing you might want to check is server latency. So, choose the one that is closer to you.

Thank you for putting it into better words than I could! I'm sure this will clear up a lot of confusion on P2P vs centralized pools

so should a miner with 2MH/s join a P2P or centralised pool? thanks

At that hashrate you can choose really, P2Pools usually have less fees but also infrequent but large payouts. Centralized pools pay out very often but you won't get as much when it does. Why don't try both for 24 hours and see what you like?