the system will reject it for being slow, The dynamics of Bitcoin limit it in many ways, it is a very complex machine hell bent on one thing... increasing economic efficiency.

to be profitable you have to be close to the mean average of the entire network, if your slower your not getting the transaction done in time, holding up economic transactions is a threat to the network so you will get a DOA.

on p2pool like in solo mining the network will punish you, by asking you, to do it again, this time faster! dammit!
In the larger pools it is very friendly to small miners, they get a cut too, plus any DOA on them is probably cause the server is getting overloaded... p2pool has a bit of a disadvantage there, it seems.

The total payout per block is much better in p2pool, far better than any other pool out there, low or non-existent fees(don't stop tipping the developer). I know mathematically that I will have a great day when we hit a good week, or a bit disappointed like last week when the pool was having a bad streak.

But how do things change eh? last few blocks have been easy, that extra power on the network is really helping.
Now if we could only get at least 1 terahash/s performance, then our average bad luck streaks will start to even out much better, getting us to the mean average consistently. This week I am very happy with my returns, truly mind blowing.

There is a lot of problems with the network; I think that is caused by improperly setup machines, maybe someone should write up a basic primer on P2pool best practices for smooth p2p networking.

Good! It means it's going to get easier to mine and the difficulty will drop!! time to get me some hardware!; and as soon as that price hits bottom, i'm buying the pieces for the next boom and bust cycle.  will I lose my shirt? na, once it gets to $40 it means i'll be able to start buying the bitcoins, the currency was designed to appreciate so, it is only a matter of time.

For the mean while I'll continue mining and spending my bitcoins that I create to support the bitcoin economy during this rough patch.

It's the size of the pool that does it; to earn decent rewards the pools have to scale, if P2pools network doesn't grow in hash power our rewards will only get worse, well sort of... if you count it in USD... you reward will be the same as long as the price goes up.

I stick to it because I know eventually it will be fixed, we will have decent hashing power once the asic problem is resolved, besides I like the idea of a decentralized transparent pool, I can look at the code and know that there is no tomfoolery going on, it can be true for the pools too.

the pool is small and at the moment only the most adept can join p2pool, that's what is hurting it, but with further updates it'll get easier more accessible to regular people, for that reason I keep the 1% developer tip while I run. The more he's got in his pocket the more incentive he has to get more people on this pool.

I find it quite amazing, I think that Bitcoin is here to stay; This is a designed currency it has been built architecturally sound.
Even with the upcoming ASICs bitcoin was built for the people as a proof of concept... distributed rewards, just imagine what else will pop up with a distributed work for pay scheme.

The ASICs are only 5 fold more powerful than a top end GPU; The price ratio is the same as well. With the momentum that is occuring now GPU miners will be profitable even with a doubling of difficulty. GPUs outnumber ASICs it will be years before the market reaches the equal distribution of GPU power vs ASICs. I give it 2 years for ASIC market saturation plenty of time for the faithful to prepare.

Increasing interest means more people, more people means a higher mean price for Bitcoin. From the beginning Bitcoin was built to have an ever increasing value, that value increases with the number of economical transaction occuring in the realworld economy, hence people will make money no matter what.  Cpu immediately became obsolete because of the disparity between CPUs and GPUs, which is as of now 150 to 1; That magnitude change was enough to make them unprofitable... on a cost per watt basis, but if the ratio of GPUs to ASICs to CPUs was changed the prevalent hardware will always make money.

This bitcoin bubble that they are talking about... it's not a bubble, it's the way this currency was designed to operate. Once the market comes back down from the high of 220 Canadian, only the most intelligent, tech savvy, aware people will remain,  because they understand what bitcoin truly is... it is an Ideal to strive for. Markets working as 300 years of economics has stated... do not tamper with the market! allow inefficient businesses to die so they can be replaced by the strong efficient well managed companies that deserve a piece of the pie, do not touch the value of the currency, supply and demand will control the distribution of goods.  after this so called bubble bursts, a million more people will know what Bitcoin stands for.

if you understand the market, you will know that a strong resilient company(stock) stays strong relative to the rest of the economy and it pays to buy their stock while it's low... because it means you will have so much more when the market begins to grow again.

these are a few of the things I believe will happen, Bitcoin, if it fails will still bring the dawn of a new technology and way of life that will survive long after it is gone.

You need to change to https://github.com/ckolivas/cgminer

p2pool does not like guiminer. so you'll need to switch.

Yo noticed that too eh? I've been just mining in P2pool for a few days now(24 hours continuous), in the last few days no one has gotten a single share, the p2pool.info is saying 4 days now without a found block; I think I may have only of gotten some Bitcoins from a few donations since I started 2 weeks ago.

P2pool is working on a very different system then the larger pools, I think Slush's pool gives out a share for every work unit regardless if the pool finds a block or not. In the end on a bad week Slush is taking the brunt of the losses, hence the 2% infrastructure tax to make sure he keeps in business.

P2pool is acting more like one big solo miner, and with an average of only 300gh/s it takes a whole day for the whole system to crack a block. meanwhile slush's pool has 6000gh/s! The averages on wins and losses smooth out a lot better on slush's pool or on the gargantuant BTC pool, that one is huge!

It also doesn't help that the pieces sent to miners is quite large, it takes my rig 760mh/s 1 hour to hash them, it is very distrubing to me when I see the estimate amount at .065 and after a dead or orphaned block It pounds right down to .043, very painful, I haven't gotten a cent in 4 days. but thatws how p2pool works one giant congregation of solo miners, working together but facing the same benefits and challenges of solo mining with the rewards being distributed.