I've been watching the pool hashrate for several days now. On 04/09, it was at 201 TH/s, and 4/10 at 2 am CST, it was 214 TH/s. Right now it's at 126 TH/s. I think people are jumping ship, but won't that just create a huge variance payout for the ones left behind? What can we do to make p2pool more efficient? Are there any ideas? I don't understand how it works enough to say. I'm not giving up, I'm staying on p2pool indefinitely. I'm thinking something else is wrong, some kind of configuration problem maybe? The expected numbers on the block list are so high after a found block the day before. I've tweaked latency issues on my own computer, and I get about 92% consistently to maybe 97% efficiency. And I run nothing else but p2pool and BTC wallet.
The simple fact is that most miners are a combination of lazy, fickle, uninformed and just all round suspicious and seem to be unable to understand payout schemes, variance and luck no matter how much it's explained to them, and their care factor for things like security of the network, distributing the hashrate etc. etc. just isn't high enough to offset the fact that the primary thing they care about is profits. Then they do pseudo experiments ignoring all the things I said above and show a better payout at some random other pool for that day and they're lost for good.