Re: [ANN][DCR] Decred - Hybrid PoW/PoS | btcsuite Devs | Tons of New Features | Go
Cheap tickets approaching? 
Getting ready for the fee war!
Getting ready for the fee war!
I still don't get the pos side, any guide to this?
There's plenty of information on the Decred forums, and the staking pools also provide (minimal) instructions on how to get your tickets assigned for pool voting. Maybe get started by browsing the documentation here: https://docs.decred.org/mining/proof-of-stake/
Yes, well I read that but I don't get the ticket/voting part. Why do I need to vote and can I lose coins if it fails for example. I couldn't find it in the documentation but maybe I read over it. I'll check it again.
If you want to understand better PoS in Decred (theoretical part) read this thread:
https://forum.decred.org/threads/understanding-of-proof-of-stake.180/
Few important things to note:
- this thread was started in January, even before Decred release, so there are a lot of wrong assumptions;
- to save your time read only responses of davecgh
In order to be eligible for the lottery, you first have to purchase stake tickets by submitting a special type of signed transaction (called a stake submission transaction, or sstx for short) to the network which locks the coins for a certain period of time. As an aside, this is why cold staking is possible because once you have signed and submitted the sstx, you no longer need the private keys for the original coins available in a hot wallet. Instead there are new private key(s) for the sstx.
When a block is mined, a lottery system is used to randomly choose 5 stake tickets which are then called to vote. This is why the stake wallet (or whatever happens to be listening) needs to be online to answer the call. Ultimately the idea is to have stake pools which allow users to pool their funds for voting towards things using multisig. The vote is actually cast by submitting another special type of transaction (called a stake submission generation transaction, or ssgen for short) which is signed by the key(s) associated with the first output of the original sstx. Note these keys are NOT the same as private keys for the original coins, which is what makes the cold staking possible and means they can't be stolen because the original coins aren't actually sent anywhere until they are released. They were simply "locked" to prevent spending. The ssgen transaction effectively casts the vote and causes the original coins and the stake reward to be delivered to the address(es) originally specified in the sstx.
I should also note that the PoS difficulty (stake difficulty) dynamically adjusts over time just like the PoW difficulty does. In practice, this means it will get more expensive to purchase stake tickets over time. This effectively keeps the ticket pool size stable and essentially creates a ticket market on the chain.