There will be good luck days as well though. You're assuming luck will always start badly. You could just as easily start mining on the pool right now and have good luck immediately. Most people have bad luck and then switch pools because they're frustrated. That's the same mindset that makes you want to sell something when the price drops. It's human emotion clouding judgement. Nothing wrong with that. Look at all the people mining BTC Guild with 7.5% pps fees so they can get regular payouts. Over time and with a rising BTC, that peace of mind can get costly. That being said, NastyPool isn't even officially "live" yet. I just thought I'd let people know there was a P2Pool node currently only charging 0.9% fees.
I understand concept of luck and variance as it relates to bitcoin mining. Unfortunately the results speak for themselves. The data says you've already lost the 'luck' game.
As of exactly right now, if you have been mining on p2pool for the past 3 months, you have paid a 9.8% premium entirely due to luck. (I don't know if this percentage includes those orphaned blocks I see on p2pool.info)
During this time, for the past 3 months, the difficulty has ranged from about 19 million 3 months ago to 112 million today.
You don't get another chance to mine at this difficulty range to make up for your lost gamble on luck.Assuming your luck changes such that you will break even on luck over the next 3 months and you regain your 9.8% premium so that you are back to 100% over past 180 days, you are still mining at a higher difficulty of 112 million - 180+million. (forecast of a conservative 10% increase each difficulty adjustment for 3 months)
I believe you are making an emotional judgment staying with p2pool and gambling that your luck will turn around during the next 3 months. (gambler's fallacy) It is better to cut your losses and switch to a stable pool, with a reasonable fee and then switch back to p2pool when difficulty stabilizes so you are not gambling low-difficulty-mining-time.
disclosure: I ran p2pool with a LS for a month spending time tweaking, adjusting, and watching my mining rewards dwindle away due to difficulty increases, bad luck, and orphaned blocks before I realized what was happening. I then quickly put a stop to it. I know how difficult it would be to toss out all the hard work you've done building the p2pool node. I know it's not easy.
My realistic suggestion is this:
Do an experiment where you assign one BFL single to commercial pool of your choice (say Eclipse, because I know you don't hate BFL/Josh yet
), and another to an independant p2pool payout address and have a competition. See which miner generates the most income after 3 months. This will conclusively confirm or deny your hypothesis that p2pool is an appropriate choice for maximizing mining rewards.
