The high rollers I'm sure don't want this disclosed, but take a look and the block explorer and rich list. Most of the top invested have not staked any coins. I asked myself why.
Ask yourself why.
As coins age, they collect weight, this weight increases chances to stake, but also how much your stake is actually worth. If it's always 1% it doesn't matter. But we're about to hit 269%.
But what happens when someone unlocks their wallet with 5 days of weight with 26 seeds on block 10101? How much will that added weight affect their day one payout?
The person with 26 seeds is doing it. And the reason is that he will significantly increase his day 1 payout, and hence his total share of the coin.
Everyone should keep that in mind going forward, some individuals may massively increase their coin share through the growth. Just by how much, I don't know.
... yes and no and I'm mortified.
Weight plays no factor in the number of coins you get, but age does. If your coins are 2 days old, you get paid 2 days worth of interest. If your coins are three days old, you get three days worth of interest. This is all well and good, because if you miss a day, you lose all the interest on the coins you would have gotten if you'd staked each day, or compound interest. Unfortunately I hadn't accounted for the fact that nobody would care about compound interest during the first week because the interest was so low. There's no special code that goes back and gives you the interest at the rate it was on the the days you missed, all interest is calculated at the current rate, and I completely missed this in development.
Age is also not limited to 24 hour periods, and that I've always been aware of. If it takes you 36 hours to stake on day 1 of growth, you'll actually get 1.5 * 2.69, but you also lose out on 12 hours you could have staked in the end, so this balances out.
We're not going to make day 7 for what it's worth. At the current pace,growth will begin in roughly 24 hours. And that's much, much earlier than I predicted, so the weight down-stepping that I coded in will actually happen too late to compensate for the faster blocks that happen because of the effect of rapid growth, so growth wont last 7 days either.
I feel awful about this, as it's a huge factor I hadn't considered. A couple of people brought it to my attention a couple of days in, and I had to think long and hard about it before ultimately having to decide that people with a keen eye would have seen this since the ico was first announced. It's smack dab in the middles of the official specs. 7 days max age. To fix the problem, I'd have to reduce that, or specifically ignore it during growth - which would also hurt everyone that loses a day over the course of the week because their coins couldn't stake fast enough. So I told the couple of people that mentioned it to me that I would leave it up to them whether or not they wanted to say anything.
At the very least I can say that there are ways to trump this that I have been completely aware of the whole time. I've always known that the growth period was going to be a bloodbath, because this is a sociological experiment as much as a technological one, where literally everything has an effect on the ultimate coin base. Everything. I just greatly underestimated just how many factors are at play here, and I completely missed the implications of this pre-growth holding tactic - which increased the amount of possible coins any one person could possibly stake.