What's the difference between solo mining and P2P mining?
p2pool is a mining pool, but the coin are directly mined to your own wallet address, so no Coins on the server. And you can encrypt your wallet to be secure. If the diff is high, then you can't mine solo anymore, so you need a pool, and p2pool is the nearest to solomining... here you find infos about p2pool https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool
Been mining for about a month now, just about to finish my first dedicated openair-rig with three 280x and my old 6870, handbuilt. Keeping two 280x's busy with Worldcoins atm and playing around/learning with the rest. Gonna try solo mining for the first time tonight with Giftcoin. Will probably expand the rig with another 280x within a week or two.