I've been mining Decred full time since I first heard about it about a month and half ago. (Sadly I missed the airdrop.) Right now the command line interface is well rather frustrating, so I THINK I've done everything correctly, but I'm not sure. When I look at my address here: https://mainnet.decred.org/address/DshYPGCcqYGB5NE4SfFtNJRutbrw3rRjo2s It shows my coins going in and out. I've never sent any of my mined coins to anyone, but I have been using them for PoS. When us this command: dcrctl -u xxxx -P xxxx --wallet getbalance "default" 0 all it tells me the balance is 249.88205087. So what's going on? PoS is pretty confusing at this point, which leads to my second question. I updated from 0.0.8 to 0.0.10 and ran the decred process, then my wallet, and got a ton of messages about it failing to do some PoS transaction because the wallet was locked. I unlocked with dcrctl, and the messages stopped, but now I'm worried that my PoS efforts were wasted. Any help would be appreciated.
You are going to have to provide a little bit more info about exactly what you did. To PoS you need to have your wallet online and unlocked 24x7x365. Another method is to use a PoS pool. Then the pool will be online 24x7x365 for you. If you did not do 1 of these two things when buying PoS tickets then yes you may have missed out on votes. Do a 'getstakeinfo' in dcrctl and post it here. If you were offline for a few days you probably missed a few votes. It is not a total disaster.
First, welcome to the community. Here is a guide for solo mining - https://forum.decred.org/threads/pos-guide-any-os-solo-stake-mining.1228/ Note that you need your wallet to be online 24x7 andand unlocked. If it is not possible for you then you take part in the stake pool for pos mining.
To answer some of your original questions: When you do a getbalance "default" 0 all then it's also showing the coins that are locked with tickets you purchased in addition to what's spendable. Once the tickets are voted or expire you get those coins back plus the PoS subsidy. To see what you have that's spendable just do a plain ol' getbalance. @drunkenmugsy's suggestion to do the getbalance will show you if you missed voting on any tickets while your wallet was locked. You will get the coins that you spent on those tickets back, so it's not like you lost any DCR, you just missed out on the subsidy. (Which still sucks, I know, but it's a lot less than the price of the ticket most likely!) Whenever you restart your wallet you always have to unlock it without a time limit immediately afterwards. Alllllllllways. Also if your wallet isn't online 24/7/365 as the previous gentlemen have stated you will miss votes and thus not be earning anything from the PoS system.
OK here is the result of the getstakeinfo command: { "poolsize": 42214, "difficulty": 25.06901121, "allmempooltix": 0, "ownmempooltix": 0, "immature": 0, "live": 13, "proportionlive": 0.0003079547069692519, "voted": 22, "totalsubsidy": 40.31315601, "missed": 2, "proportionmissed": 0.08333333333333333, "revoked": 0 }
OK that clears some things up, although it seems like kind of a catch-22 since you can only unlock your wallet so fast after you open it (why can't I include an unlock command when I first run the wallet?). I do have a dedicated mining PC that I also put all my PoS coins on including Decred so I do leave it running 24/7. The only time I shut it down is for things like OS updates, or wallet updates so this happened when I updated my Decred executables. Am I correct then in thinking that the "send" in the block explorer is my Decred coins being used for PoS? Like I said I've never sent them to anyone.
Correct. Technically they're being sent but only to a holding address until your ticket is called or expired. Then it sends back.
"live": 13, <---Tickets you have waiting to vote "voted": 22, <--- TIkcets that voted "totalsubsidy": 40.31315601, <--- DCR you made PoSing "missed": 2, <--- Votes you missed. Looks ok to me. Missing 2 sucks but not end of world suck.
Thats a lot. I've missed 9 of 331 votes. 2 because of recreating wallet from seed 4 because next block after voting was mined to fast to include my vote 3 unknown reason Your nettwork is slow maybe, provider issue?
I missed the first 32 or so because I was on holiday when block 4096 rolled around and I forgot I turned off the router before I left. The rest are slow CPU/network. I've since moved to AWS and haven't missed any.