As jedimstr said, I did receive a sizable donation from the Litecoin foundation, and I have since been brainstorming and prototyping ways to fix the core problems with P2Pool - scalability and excessive variance for small miners. I prototyped a way to do trustless verification of blocks with O(1) storage so that we could free most P2Pool nodes from needing a local *coin node. I've spent a ton of time thinking of ways to implement parallel sharechains so that we can have shares more often, decreasing variance for small miners, while decreasing the strict latency requirements for hardware, sadly without any concrete results yet. Because this is a hard problem. I spent hundreds of hours in the summer of 2011 thinking about how P2Pool could possibly work, in a time before merged mining or pools with coinbase payouts even existed. Any further improvements that get us out of this local maxima that we're stuck in will require comparable amounts of thought. Some relief though - a few days ago, when people prodding renewed my eagerness, I may have made a breakthrough in ideas for how to get parallel sharechains to work (which I discussed in #p2pool).

Despite that, it is hard to work on this project when most people insist on cutting off the pool donations to me. When I see guides telling people to use --give-author 0 without any mention made of what it does, people blindly following them, or people asking me for help, providing screenshots of them running P2Pool with donations disabled, it hurts a bit. Actually, more than a bit. Right now, I get 0.09% of the revenue from P2Pool due to node donations (which default to 1%), which likely means that about 90% of people have completely disabled donations. That doesn't result in much revenue. Just today I spent about 10 hours getting http://p2pool.info/ working, which is the equivalent of two weeks of pool donations - if I were being paid minimum wage! I don't have a job (I am a student) and I do have other side-ventures that I'm working towards that look a bit more optimistic, so pardon me for rationally allocating my free time.

I don't believe anybody disabled donations because of a lack of development - pool donations have been comparably low for a very long time, since before this development hiatus - so I don't think I'm being "punished" for not working hard enough or obviously enough. I don't think that most miners ever think about their donation amount again after setting it or pay attention to development. (I don't blame them for not dedicating their lives to tweaking P2Pool. ) But this is vicious downward cycle and anyone running P2Pool with donations lower than the default while demanding improvements (or even planning to use P2Pool for an extended amount of time) is a hypocrite. It's simply a lack of foresightedness when miners decide to prioritize an amount of income that is invisible in the noise of variance of P2Pool payouts over the sustainability of P2Pool. Perhaps we'd be better off if I hadn't changed the mandatory 0.5% fee to an optional 0.5% donation (does anyone here even remember that?).

I do plan to continue working on P2Pool, and eventually great changes will happen. Unless something changes though, don't expect it to happen too quickly, and don't be surprised if people who disable donations get bugged a bit more when they start P2Pool (or with any other similar change to increase donations).