One of the nice features of p2pool is the ability to donate - and surprisingly, people do indeed donate.  That is one advantage over mining the other pools.

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.