I have been trying to understand the idea of Proof Of Stake but I still have multiple questions on how it works, and how profitable it can be. 1. How profitable can it be with 350 decred 2. Is there a chance you lose your decred? 3. Should you join a pool or solo?
1/ my simulations show about 9% give or take 2/ no, unless user error 3/ you need to be online 24/7/365, otherwise you lose rewards and decrease your profit. So the pool is better for a beginner
With 9% what exactly do you mean? 9% win chance, 9% gain of 350 after a month or year? And could you also tell me how you calculated so I can also calculate it with other numbers.
I would agree that the average ROI is close to 9%. The calculations to get exact values are much more complicated than I am going to explain (TBH I don't know how to factor in all the variables), but here is the most basic idea. Ticket prices fluctuate every 144 blocks (~12 hours). Suppose you can purchase tickets during the low prices around 19-20 DCR. The current reward for each vote is 1.7632. At 19 DCR that is just over a 9% return on your initial principle. At 20 DCR the return is just under 9%. Nobody can guarantee when your tickets will vote, although there is a 99% probability that your ticket will vote before it expires 40960 blocks (~142 days) later. The more advanced calculations come into play when you factor in the number of tickets you want to purchase and the probability that each one has to vote. If you only have a few tickets, it's likely that you will hold onto the tickets for several weeks before getting a vote. Similar to PoW mining where the more hashpower you have, the more you will earn... the more DCR you have to invest into PoS tickets, the more you will make and the quicker you will make it.
So if I were to put my 350 decred all on pos I would get an average of 31.5 decred per year which is 0.0875 decred per day?
31.5DCR per month. 9% per month. About 1DCR per day. Now you can see why PoS is a good investment! =)
Yup! You can use this as a rule thumb, for simplicity, your return per month is as follow depending on your ticket price. 5DCR = 35% 10DCR = 17% 20DCR = 8.5% 40DCR = 4.25%
Also, the prices of tickets would increase as more tickets are bought right? So the ticket price won't stay around this range if the coin became more popular. Because if it did stay like this, you would have 10845455 decred in 10 years starting with 350!(350*1. 09^120)
Of course the price won't stay. When more people get to know about dcr, there will be more demand and hence driving up the price permanently. But for now, the average "acceptable" ticket price seems to stabilize around 20 which is still very good! Start early and don't miss the chance. This is also base on a pos reward of 1.7 DCR for every ticket voted. This will also reduces over time. So there is quite a lot of variable involved and the actual calculation it's quite complex, but this simple calculation should be working for only another 2-3 months at most.
A still have a few questions. What is the best way to profit. Try to buy tickets at low prices, always buy or buy if there isn't a spike. Also how does it work. Do you buy tickets, then you can use them on any block you want by voting yes or no, then 5 of those tickets are chosen to be given 1.7(currently) decred? And can you use your tickets on any block you want? And, the ticket price is dependent on the amount of ticket bought in the previous round? So if the ticket price was 15, allot of people would buy which would make the price spike. Thanks for your help
The following thread has a lot of specifics about PoS works. The thread was started before Decred was even released, so there are a lot of incorrect assumptions, but if you read through my responses, it's all clarified. https://forum.decred.org/threads/understanding-of-proof-of-stake.180/
Thanks for the help, the thread there and the links I visited in the thread answered all my questions