i tried a bit litecoin mining with pooledbits.com. I found that only after 3 hours of mining a revenue started. And from that time it came in constantly. So i wonder why that is. Is it similar to p2pool where i read that you have to mine 12 hours until your income gets more because long time miners are rewarded higher or was it only bad luck? It would be strange because now often the earnings change.
This behavior is typical for PPLNS pools. P2Pool is also PPLNS, so it behaves similarly. The reason it took only 3 hours instead of 12 is that Litecoin generates blocks 4x more frequently than Bitcoin. With a conventional PPLNS pool (PooledBits, burnside's pool, Eclipse, etc.), the blocks that your shares count toward need to mature for 120 blocks before the pool pays them out. With P2Pool, you receive coins from the generation transaction in each block the pool finds; they show up at your address immediately, but must mature for 120 blocks before you can do anything with them.
(I had been running P2Pool up until this morning...litecoind latency had gotten sufficiently high that I think it was driving my earnings into the basement. I have bitcoind, litecoind, a Litecoin P2Pool instance, and cgminer running on an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ with 2 GB of RAM, which might've been a bit much. I have 4 GB on order from a seller on Bitmit; once it arrives, I'll pop it in and see if latency improves enough to make P2Pool usable again. I briefly switched back to burnside's pool, but was getting an unacceptably high percentage of stales. I'll give PooledBits a shot in the meantime.)
