I have read that P2P profits long term are greater, does this still hold true?
Nobody can answer that, since it depends so much on luck and other factors. With the luck taking a very long time to average out, so the other factors a are really hard to measure. Over the past few months p2pool has had fairly bad luck. Very recently luck has been a little better. The future, nobody knows.
However, I will say that the expected value of the p2pool payout method (if set to zero fees) is higher than the expected value of the eligius payout method for finite time. Maybe that is important to you.
I'm not sure that last statement about being higher payout than Eligius is accurate. You can put 0% donation into both, both pay transaction fees, and Eligius pays merged mining on NMC. Yes you can merge mine in p2pool, but you are solo merged mining, which is almost the same as solo mining BTC.
And when you throw in increasing variance with p2pool, I definitely think Eligius comes out ahead (which is why I'm there, not on p2pool).
M
it will be always big discussion which pool has better payouts. if we are only "thinking" about it this discussion is senseless...
i have reference miners in different pools since 2 months and can say pretty clear that mining in eligius is for sure
not more effective than mining in p2pool. even with lots of bad luck in p2pool last few months i have better payouts in p2pool.
it looks like p2pool has a big variance, but in reality every pool has some variances. p2pool maybe does not find a block some days long and we speak already about "big loss and variance", but nobody recognizes when other pools with huge hash rate has daily payout drop of 30-40% and that sometimes several days.
payout stability of ghash.io, btcguild, eligius etc. is a myth. everyone has low payout phases and mostly this "lows" make payout in in the end (long terms) worse than it is in p2pool.
Those are my real experiences and not just what i am thinking.