From my understanding, individual users still have to purchase the tickets. They just allow the pools to vote on their behalf once the tickets are already purchased by using an additional flag when they purchase a ticket. I think the only impact pools will have on the PoS market is that more people will begin to PoS mine, increasing the demand for tickets, which will cause an increase in price over the long run.
It makes sense. The minpricescale and maxpricescale allow you to buy tickets at higher prices to ensure that the difficulty doesn't go down too low, while also stopping buying tickets that would drive the difficulty too far upwards. This lets you basically "set" the difficulty, so whoever is running the software with a lot of coins has a major advantage over someone with a simple price threshold that is waiting for the price to go very low. The price will never drop, allowing the person with the software running to get the most tickets. The hope is with multiple people running it and competing with it, while reinvesting coins they receive as subsidy, that we will see long term stabilization. This means fairer ticket prices for everyone and a lower likelihood of proof of work miners manipulating the staking system at low stake difficulties.
People using stake pools have a huge incentive not to let the difficulty drop too low, as they cannot compete on fees with people who are solo staking. With the dcrticketbuyer letting people easily keep the price above a certain level, if they have the funds, then I think we won't be seeing low difficulty price wars too often!
I've seen many ticket purchases at higher prices. I don't know if someone is trying to make any "speculation"(even a big staker should have lower profits on high prices so there is no real speculation) or if there are people don't really know what they doing, buying tickets at any cost or they mistakenly take "ESTIMATED TICKET PRICE" on https://dcrstats.com/ as current "TICKET PRICE"(but even in such case they have to use the current price as ticketmaxprice), maybe @Dyrk can change it to something like "ESTIMATED NEXT TICKET PRICE".
I noticed a pattern of ticket purchases awhile ago in what appears to be coming from the original dev/company 0 ticket addresses. It'd be a bit harder to track where they're coming from now but you can probably trace them back if you tried. I thought that it was some sort of PoS market stimulus to control the range that the PoS price can fluctuate between each round of 144 blocks, but I didn't get a definitive answer.
I'll leave it to someone else to figure out where the tickets are from. As we have all seen the algorithm is a bit aggressive in it's response. A change in the algorithm apparently requires a hardfork so it is a good thing something or someone is stabilizing the "dips". As it is the system works but is less than optimal at least for me. I can still manage to purchase tickets at what I consider a reasonable price. However, it would be good to get a more stable price so the purchasing could be done at a more even pace. It is not impossible that the price will stabilize a bit when more DCR is staked and the average ticket price approached 25 DCR but this is just a guess. Oh, and I'd like to add that figuring out what a good algorithm should look like is not easy because assumptions have to be made regarding purchasing behavior that do not necessarily work when actual people are involved. People make irrational choices. Buying at a crazy high price, buying all tickets at once at any price and of course in general not understanding how to make the best of the system. Same as the stock market.
Is there any way to use this tool in Windows too? On the https://github.com/decred/dcrticketbuyer I can find a guide only for Linux/BSD/MacOSX/POSIX.
I am still having problem with the webui of dcrticketbuyer. My graphs are all showing empty. I downloaded and fresh installed the latest 0.2.0 using auto installation and even made sure that my webUI content has all the required files and lib. I tried this on 2 different computers, one running Windows 7 and another Windows 10. Both having same issue. Changing browser from Chrome to IE and Firefox does not solve the issue. The only things that appear to be populated correctly was the CSV files (my prices.csv attached), although it contain some dummy heights from from 8XXXX. Not sure what are they for.