Hello everyone, A stake pool proof-of-concept is now running and is ready for testing. It is currently running on testnet only and is available at https://teststakepool.decred.org. A stake pool allows you to purchase tickets and have the pool redeem and vote on your behalf. The pool has no access to your funds. At worst, the pool could vote in a way that you disagree with. This is perfect for people who wish to take part in Decred's proof-of-stake (PoS) mining but cannot do so due to a range of factors: You do not want to keep a wallet unlocked constantly You lack of a reliable, fast, and low latency Internet connection You do not have access to hardware that is online 24/7 for months The plan for stake pools going forward is as follows: Get issues worked out using the testnet pool Add outstanding stake pool features Launch a pool for mainnet use Release the source code In the near future, the project would like members of the Decred community to become stake pool operators for which they can charge a nominal fee for doing so. This would allow the project to shut down the proof-of-concept pool so development can be transferred to other priorities. You are thus cordially invited to come jump in the stake pool and help test! Sincerely, Decred Project Note: An issue tracker has been opened at https://github.com/decred/dcrstakepool/issues for any issues you find. Report them so the project can improve and fix problems.
Does PoS pool split reward between all participants (% based on amount of tickets you submitted to pool)?
It is technically possible to create a pool that supports proportional reward splitting, but this pool does not do that at all. This one simply votes on your behalf. It does this by making the ticket voting rights a 1-of-2 multi-signature P2SH script. The pool signs the vote with its private key at the time the ticket is selected. Since it's a 1-of-2 multi-signature script though, it means if the pool failed to vote for you for whatever reason (extremely unlikely as the mainnet pool will have multiple redundancy and automatic failover), it would still be possible to vote on your own behalf because you have the second private key and could therefore provide a valid signature and satisfy the 1-of-2 requirement. Also, it's important to note that the original ticket purchase contains a commitment to go to a reward address for which only you have the private key. The PoS voting consensus rules enforce the commitment, so it is impossible for the pool to steal your funds. In order to split rewards the pool would have to be the recipient of all rewards and then be trusted to properly split the rewards amongst all of the participants according to their proportionality. I fully expect such a scheme will be developed with the understanding it is less secure than the approach the current pool uses.
Yes, I'm doing it right now. Just add --testnet to the appropriate spots (dcrd, dcrwallet, dcrctl) and everything will work. This is why they use different ports and data/log directories!
so they will not mess up each others RPC cetificates, .conf & data files? as they all live in same folder.
Nope, the same certs will be used for both. The only thing to watch out for is if you have a mining address in the dcrd conf file then it will error because the mining address is for the wrong network. You can use --configfile to point it at a different config file if you need.
$ dcrctl --testnet --wallet sendtoaddress TsfGFjhz6nDW17z8YCqfuVgWbGNFadgKeug 45 e68ff4bbadb610ad9c08dfcec5c690ad748a78bc7756bacb79c5f519af62bafa
hmm it seems i have to run my wallet to buy tickets. will they vote w/o me so that i run the wallet to buy tickets & then shut it down when pool votes for me?
Yes that is correct. You only need to run wallet in order to spend your coins to purchase the ticket which delegates your voting rights to the pool that will then vote on your behalf. As I previously mentioned, the reward address is a consensus-enforced commitment in the ticket purchase for one of your own addresses for which only you have private key. Unfortunately the block explorer does not yet properly decode the commitment in order for you to see the final reward address, but it's definitely there and you can see it as the "Subsidy Commitment".
Alright purchased 1 ticket and the balance is now sent to a change address. do i have to wait 16 confs to see my balance via getbalance? I cant buy any more tickets and price is rising. EDIT: one of the blocks with my tickets/sstx orphaned but ticket is still shown in stakepool. Here is the tx which is obviously not available on explorer. https://testnet.decred.org/tx/28da3fff470569a2f14cfa9c88ab73929c0dba498bca612cd3866f067fc0dd8c