Time to Stake is an important factor especially for low balance holders, as BOINC reward has to be collected within 6 months. But what exactly is Time to Stake? In this article I also introduce a Confident Time to Stake, which is in my opinion a better way to estimate a minimum balance and expected times to stake.

Let's play a die and be modern and call one die a dice :)

Let's assume your winning number is FOUR. Your chance (probability) to throw FOUR is 1/6. Now let's throw a dice once every second. If you do it 600 times you will get FOUR exactly or around 100 times. Expected or average time to get FOUR is 6 seconds. But what is probability to throw FOUR within 6 seconds? You can get 4 first time you try, or both in the first second and in the second second :), or.. etc... etc... but it's getting complicated and too difficult for me so I will use a trick. Note, that you can only throw FOUR or 1,2,3,5,6, (NOT FOUR). Probability p to throw NOT FOUR within 6 seconds is (5/6)^6 (5/6 to power 6). As we throw either FOUR or NOT FOUR (which probability altogether is 1), we get probability to throw FOUR at least once equal to 1-p or 1- (5/6)^6 = 0.665. It means there is 33.5 % chance not to hit FOUR even once (within 6 seconds). If we try for 25 seconds, probability to score FOUR at least once is 0.990. Quite high, but if there would be 1000 contestants, around 10 of them would NOT score FOUR even once. Now back to Gridcoin.

Time to Stake

Wallet prints Time to Stake information. Currently it’s kind of an average based on the last 72 blocks. There is an ongoing debate on improving this number. For more information see

A quick rule of thumb formula for calculating expected time to stake

Gridcoin V8 difficulty and what it tells you

Confident Time to Stake or Confidence-p Time to Stake

Notation:

p – probability not to stake

B – your matured balance

b – number of blocks

N – total number of matured coins in the network

ps – probability to stake at least once

Example:

You have B = 2000 matured coins (valuesum), there is N = 9,544,371 matured coins in the network (netstakeweight) and you set ps = 0.99, i.e. you want to have 99% confidence to stake a block within X days. From the above equation you get X = 22.9 days, while Time to Stake would be around 5 days.

For conversion between difficulty and total number of matured coins in the network see linked articles.

I don’t use GUI, but if you will type in in the console ‘getmininginfo’ you will get netstakeweight and valuesum information.