To Stake: Download one of the wallets from Decred's download page. Paymetheus for Windows and Decrediton for Mac/Linux. Your wallet will need time to update itself to the latest block and may take some time. It will do this automatically in the background. Right now we are at block 164,794. Send your DCR to your wallet Pick a staking pool and sign up on the pool's website. Copy their API key they will provide to you. A list of staking pools and their websites can be found at the bottom of The Decred Stats Page. They do charge a small fee (5% or less) to be used. My pools API key was found in the settings page on their website. This is important because while in a stake pool you do not need your wallet open 24/7 for a ticket to vote. Go to the Tickets tab located within the Paymetheus/Decredition wallet. Here you will see the current Ticket price (the cost of DCR needed to stake per ticket). Click Manage Pools next to Stake Pool Preference and input your pools API key. Now you are connected to the pool. Enter the number of tickets you would like to buy. The Default transaction fee of 0.001 is fine (it's the minimum). You'll be asked to enter your passphrase to complete the transaction. Your ticket, once purchased, enters the mempool and waits to be mined. Once your ticket is mined it'll go to immature status, you will see this in the Stake Mining tab on Paymetheus. Now you will have to wait around a day or so for your ticket to mature and go live. Once it's live you wait for your ticket to vote and you'll recieve your original Decred spent on the ticket plus the reward of ~1.45 DCR (this will lower as time goes on). Your funds will need roughly 24 hours to be spendable again. On average, live tickets vote within 28 days but can take as long as 142.22 days (40960 blocks) to vote. If a ticket does not vote within this window, it expires, and the ticket fee is lost (don't worry, the cost of the ticket is refunded). However, the chances of this happening are less than .5%. The term vote is used because as a Staker in Decred, you will be voting on different proposals to change, improve, or do anything we'd like with Decred. It is the heart of the Decred governance model; the concept being individuals with skin in the game will want the best for the project. You'll notice there are Voting Preferences in the ticket tab. This is where you can decide on your vote. The proposals currently listed in the wallet have already passed with a 'Yes'. The Lightning Network is being worked on as we speak. As an incentive for participating in this voting process and locking up your Decred for possibly 4 months, you are rewarded with Decred (Again, it's 1.45 DCR as of the moment). As far as profits go, the estimated ROI per ticket is 2.23%. Now, if your ticket votes within the average of 28 days every month the profitable could be ~27% per year, which is quite amazing.