lots of opinions.
here s mine.
go with p2pool.
you ll help the network because of decentralisation. you get freshly minted coins with no history. virgin coins.
your payouts should be better than with any other pool. thats because simply mosts of the public nodes you can connect your miner to, have no fees.
0% fee goes only with a great heart or with mergemining. a node with mergemining will at best only cover the costs for hosting. so their is no profit at all for the node operator in contrary to big, centralised pools who do take up to 3% fee's.
As you can see your opinion is not much different of mine.
Average payouts in longer terms are really much better than in centralized pools ant not only because of high fees of centralized pools. there are many other reasons..
most of 0% fee nodes have their merged coins clients in background running and try to cover costs with merged mining. its only my opinion, but i experienced that merged mining clients make the node less effective (even when stats are showing that everything is ok) and payouts are little lower (my testing experience 2-3%) than without merged mining. specially IOC and IXC make big efficiency difference.
so finally i decided to set to my a fee of 1% and that should cover most cost. even with this fee, my miner have higher payouts than without fees in some other nodes (i made several parallel tests), i think its because of only BTC-mining.
in reality costs for keeping up good node are not really 1% if mining power is high enough thats why i decided to support p2pool development and will donate half of income to devs of p2pool. i hope that some other public-node-owner will do it same way soon so we will have better p2pool and will have more miners here.
a big pool who offers you mergemining, but takes 1-3 % fees of your income is a deception for the miner.
Right, but sad as it is most miner did not get it yet.
if you dont know how to setup a node use a public one. look at my signature.
there are many nodes to use. if anybody has interest then here are some lists of public nodes:
p2pool-nodes.info or
p2pools.org. not all of them have high efficiency so make sure you will use always the same username (your btw-address) when you are testing them. only so you can be sure that you don't loose your made shares.
one disadvantage of p2pool is the big variance in payouts because p2pool is small. payouts are done immediately after a block is found, but blocks are not found on hourly basis, instead a new block is found by p2pool every 21 hours or so. but one day p2pool will not find anything, the other day it will find two blocks.
i don't see this as big disadvantage. it makes miners maybe nervous sometimes, but it is the same like falling rates in exchanges: many people are selling when rates are falling and lose their money. those who are keeping do not lose anything.
payout system on p2pool is PPLNS wich is good against poolhopping. but because it need up to three days for ramping out your payments it may look at the first two days that you are making less.
as an unexperienced miner this will doubt you, but give it a try.
first 3 days there are really lower payouts, but usually most of miner make already in first week already same amount of BTC as others in centralized pools.
