Hello! I have seen confusion and confused very much myself with stakes and voting, so I hope with this post you don’t have these doubts anymore! EDIT: some delegates have made calculators that include an autostake on/off option.

1st doubt: Which of the following options is the best?

A) X/2 time with and X/2 without autostake

B) X time with autostake (except the last stake duration), but lower stake duration

C) X time without autostake

Well, the answer is… After the 2nd doubt!

2nd doubt: Who should I vote?

There are several criterias to think this: rewards obtained, role and contributions up to date

This is my opinion, but since this is the 1st month you should value if the Delegate has already contributed! IoTeX Brand Ambassadors and some companies have been showing a great commitment even before the Delegates Program launched. There are also some who have already developed tools and others who are continuously helping the community. Another good point is checking if the Delegate helped bootstrapping the Mainnet.

Results for the 1st question:

If you were thinking about profit and thought C, you are right. But if you were thinking about the profit-flexibility rate, the answer should be A! With option A, if you change your mind you can stop the autostake at a time Z (lower than X/2) and get your tokens at Z+X/2. B was the best for flexibility.

However, how can we compare anything? This is the magic formula!

Okay, it’s not so magic, you only have to worry about x, y and the result. X is the stake duration, Y is the total number of days, and the result is the summatory of the the bonus voting power you gain. Simple?

For illustration process I have calculated the bonus voting power sumatory and the average for 5 different cases with Y=365 days: (in the spreadsheet you can also see cases without autostake!)

As you can see, the resultant average extra voting power is a 6% more if the stake duration is 6 months (182 days) over if it is 35 days.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, calculating the voting power is like making an integral. You are calculating the total area from the staking duration down to 0. So, if you think of the area as duration x bonus voting power, and compare autostake on vs off in a duration of 350 days you get:

And if you divide that area by the total duration you get the average bonus voting power.

I hope it is useful for you, and in case you want to see how I did the calculations you can see the spreadsheet.