As there seems to be some confusion about staking from some who may not have had experience with PoS coins (and particularly PoS 2.0 staking) here are my findings/research/etc. from BlackCoin which definitely apply (as it's the first PoS 2.0):
In a PoS 1.0 coin you 'banked' coin-age
and weight... i.e. if you have 1M coins which stake at 1% per year and you wait one year before unlocking and staking that wallet (actually one year plus 8 hours or whatever the minimum age is set to)... you will receive 10K coins as your staking reward - plus any fees awarded for the block, same as you will now actually. However the difference is that
this will occur nearly instantaneously in PoS 1.0 because your coins will have a very large weight (somewhere around
365 million in fact). The problem with this is that it would potentially allow for a smaller holding wallet to be more likely to craft a 51% attack because once this wallet comes online to stake it will have a significantly higher weight than anyone who has been staking all along - even if that other person has 10M coins in their wallet (since those coins will likely have staked within the past day or so the 'competing weight' will be
36 times less despite representing a coin-value of
10 times more).
That this compounded the already widely discussed issues of PoW/PoS hybrid coins and the 'nothing-at-stake' issue caused a need for improvement.
To solve this Pavel (rat4) adjusted staking (in PoS 2.0 - see whitepaper) so that weight disregards coin-age... so that means that while your
award can be made artificially large in a single transaction by keeping a wallet offline and all coins from a single transaction - that wallet will have
no greater possibility for solving a block than a similar sized wallet which has been online the entire time. So someone has next to no possibility to 'guess' when their blocks will occur, simply by remaining offline - thus next to no possibility to use that maliciously to fork the chain and potentially double-spend (and all the more reason to stay online helping to secure the blockchain 24/7).
What this means for a normal wallet holder is that your holdings are the only thing making it more likely that you will 'win' your stake. Someone with 10M BAY which is all mature will have a 10X greater chance of getting the next block than someone with 1M BAY does... and that person will have a similarly greater chance than someone with 100K BAY has. However, rest assured that once your turn occurs... even if that takes a month... then your award will be the appropriate size (somewhere around 0.000027397 per coin - or 1% divided by 365 - multiplied by the coin-age). If it takes a month then you'll get 30 times as much, once awarded... but it won't be any more likely to solve the next block than it was on day 1.
I think the problem many people are encountering is that a ton of BAY are still on BTER (or Bittrex now). So those that moved coins into their wallets earliest had a very high probability of staking quickly - since competition for the blocks was limited. As more and more people move their coins into the wallet and off of the exchange - this will naturally make the time between block awards longer as well, since more people are in the 'lottery' in the first place.
It may seem like it sucks... but it's actually making for a much, much more secure blockchain (and you get basically the same amount... just more coins less often).
Ultimately it would be great (security-wise) to see distribution so wide that none of us would get more than a few staking awards per year... but we're at least a couple million wallets away from that situation. LOL!
If I've confused something or made a mistake, please post a correction - it's been a long day.
No need to apologize you've helped me out with this info (and MANY others I'm sure lol). Thanks.
