ah you can vote endless with the same ticket, i thought there was a limit for that btw this guide is everything that i need to buy vote and buy ticket, the rest is just done by the client right?
Once a ticket is voted, it is spent and the funds locked with the ticket and the stake reward will be spendable in your wallet after 256 blocks. A ticket can be called to vote once and is then removed from the ticket pool. I'm not sure what guide you're referring to, but essentially you need to have your wallet set to --enablestakemining, and have your wallet unlocked so you can purchase tickets and have your wallet automatically vote on them when one of your tickets is drawn. The basics are covered in https://wiki.decred.org/Solo_Stake_Mining though some of the documentation makes reference to testnet which you of course would need to remove. The guide also does not take into account the stake pool that has since come online. Make sure you understand what you are doing when staking. The funds used to stake are locked and cannot be spent while its ticket is waiting to vote. The average time for a ticket to be drawn is 28 days, but in the highly unlikely, but possible, chance it does not get selected after ~4 months, the ticket will expire.
talking about this guide https://forum.decred.org/threads/pos-guide-any-os-solo-stake-mining.1228/#post-13345 so i was right you can use the ticket only once then you need to buy again to vote so each buy is equal to 1 vote, based on the currenty price of the ticket of course
There are tons of guides. Pick your poison(OS) and you will find a guide for it. I started out PoW mining on testnet with 2 x R9 380s. I was all like man this is easy. I got kickstarted with 100dcr from the devs on testnet and went to town. I had over 1500dcr on testnet within the week. As this was my first dip into cryptocoins and mining I was all over PoW. I toyed with PoS as well. Then the party was over. Mainnet went up and the big boys with tons of hashrate came in, the difficulty was orders of magnitude higher on mainnet. PoW was not as simple as all that. It took tons of electricity to run just those 2 cards. I had planned on building a 6 GPU rig to PoW like crazy. Then I got crazy smart. Crazy like a fox - PoS is much easier/cheaper to do. You just need a fairly large stack of coins to do it. So I got rid of the 2 GPU I had and grabbed a RPi2 I had sitting around and set up PoS. Never looked back. Getting a 90% return(2DCR stake gets you a 1.8DCR reward) on the several hundred stake tickets I had initially was a no brainer. I know PoS will eventually require an even bigger stack to keep buying the amount of tickets I have right now. Hopefully I can keep up. We will always need both PoW and PoS. PoS is the route I chose to go.
mmh, i was thinking on buying some for this pos thing, really profitable, i'm going to try with a low amount first, 1 ticket only to see if the stacking is working in my wallet
Exactly. I live in central Europe which is bit colder in the winter time. I switched off my community central-heating in apartment and using only waste heat from my miners. So side product of keeping my apartment warm are DCRs. After mine few of them they go to PoS. Win-Win situation with PoW and PoS. But summer will be game changer . I really hope for short and cold summer this year.
how the locked time frame is calculated, i've read somewhere that if you don't want to rebuy the ticket there are chance that your decred are locked for a longer time than the usual 28 days
I am in Texas. Last summer we hit 119F. PoW is not a long term option when I am paying the electric. When your stake ticket is voted there is not a mandate to rebuy a ticket. The funds are yours. You can do whatever you want with them once they are returned to your account. You can read elsewhere about the exact time frames. The only way your stake is kept longer than 28 days (8192 blocks) is if your stake ticket is not voted. That is just an average. You can buy a stake and it can vote the moment it goes from immature to live. It can also take as long as 142 days to be voted. If after 142 days it is not voted your stake DCR is returned with no PoS reward.
It is all pretty much based on luck with an almost 99% chance you will vote in 28 days. This is how it works. You have X% chance to vote every block based on how many tickets you have. For example - 40960 tickets total in PoS pool and you have 100 tickets? You have a .244%(.00244) chance to vote. There are 3-5(typically 5, 80% currently) votes per block. The more tickets you have the better your chance to vote. This makes sense as you are committing or pledging more DCR to voting based on the number of votes you have. You have more say based on how much you pledge. If you wanted a 10% chance to vote per block you would have to have 4096 stake tickets in the example above.
That's not entirely correct. As you said, there's 5 votes per block. So each ticket has 5 chances of being chosen per block. Therefore, if you have 100 tickets your chance per block is 500/40960 = 0.0122 = 1.22%. There are around 288 blocks mined per day so with 100 tickets you have a pretty good chance of having at least one come up for vote each day. I have just over 200 tickets and I see around 3-7 votes each day.
I see how your numbers mesh. I also have over 200 stake tickets and see similar voting returns. I was going off of the proportion live % from getstakeinfo. Which would be a % for all of your mature tickets vs poolsize. But as the devs have said vote % chance is not cumulative. It is the same if a ticket is 1 day old or 20 days old. But if you 5X that I suppose that would be the % chance to vote per block. However the chance is not X / 40960. It is X / <poolsize> which is also in getstakeinfo. I kept it at the 1 vote % just because not all blocks get 5 votes. I do like your math words better though. hehe p.s I have double voted on the same block! more than once! (3 times that I have seen so far) I guess I am just lucky.
so it's not convenient to buy vote with one ticket only? because you have a very slow chance to vote, it can possible require waiting days just to get the vote?
This is why Stake Pools are being prepared, so guys like you can just buy a few tickets without needing to make arrangements to keep your wallet online 24/7/365. Already saw a massive influx of PoS voters.
Yeah, I need to stop posting late at night. I blame it on writing the docs and not wanting to type anymore. Yes, you're correct it's not 40960 it's the pool size. I used that because it was in your example, but didn't explicitly say that. Anyone wanting to know why we chose that number, it's the target number of votes in the pool. Above this number the stake price goes up, below it goes down (generally). I've also done some math on the chances of voting with random distribution and it matches what the devs said. Chance for a ticket to be voted in a given time frame: 1 - (1 - P)^N Where: P is the probability of a vote in one block. N is the number of blocks before ticket expiry. P = 4.5 / Pool size = 4.5 / 42000 (I'm using 42K as it's a nice round number and reflective of what's in the pool at this moment. The 4.5 is a ballpark figure reflecting the fact that not all blocks have 5 votes.) N = 288 * 142 (142 days to ticket expiry, approx 288 blocks per day (1 block every 5 mins. It's a bit lower than that so there's more than 288 blocks per day currently). So if you plug the numbers in you get a 98.75% chance that any given ticket will be voted before expiry.
so it seems that i've urchased a ticket but how to see where the ticket balance is? now those coins wnet away in another of my addresses, that by the way they are created out of thin air at random?
It really depends on one's circumstances. An R9 290 nets you around 1.5 GH/s for about $250 (I think it's still the best bang for your buck?). So $1000 would get you 6 GH/s for mining, or purchase 392 DCR for staking. This ignores the cost of Motherboards, PSU's, etc to get the GPU's mining, and effectively assumes you have access to that equipment which in most cases you would need to purchase as well. PoW: 6 GH/s would earn you on average 186 DCR in 28 days at current difficulty. Power consumption will be around 1300W, which might cost between $45 and $130 in electricity ($.05-$.15 / kWh), leaving effective return between 135 - 168 DCR, or 4.82-6 DCR/day without taking into account depreciation of Graphics cards/hardware, down-time or increases in difficulty. If you have to buy all new motherboards/rigs/cpu/PSU, you could probably cut this figure by 1/3. PoS: 392 DCR would purchase approximately 24 tickets at present. Average time for a ticket to be redeemed is 28 days, for an average return of 44.4 DCR or 1.59 DCR/day. If tickets are bought on the low side for ~8 DCR each, you would increase this to 49 tickets, 90.65DCR total & 3.24 DCR/day with not maintenance, capital purchases, risk of hardware failure or depreciation. Neither of these scenarios include block reward decrease, which is effectively the same for both. PoW is higher risk, higher reward, but does not scale as easily as PoS. If you are plugging a single GPU into an existing motherboard/PSU it will be the most cost-effective scenario (and what these numbers are essentially based on). If you have to buy rigs/MoBo's/PSU's for a larger setup, it will cost you considerably more. The longer you PoW mine for, the less of an impact depreciation of equipment will have on your return, however PoS ties your funds up for longer. Also, in my case I sold all my GPU's for DCR early on and purchased tickets @ 2DCR each. Even at this point my average ticket price is <5DCR each. However, if these ticket prices keep going up might have to get some cards again