There is close to 2B Algos in circulation. Of these only 1.1B algos are being staked. Can someone tell me who/why would not stake their Algos? In other words what are the conditions under which your Algos become unstakable?
I haven’t found any material that would explain this anomaly.
Online Stake is stake is stake that belongs to accounts that have been taken online and are participating in consensus. Offline stake is tokens not participating in consensus.
In order for an account to be online a participation key has to be generated and the account has to issue a changeonlinestatus transaction. These can be done with the goal command line tool.
Currently rewards are given to both online and offline accounts equally.
We will be updating some docs on developer.algorand.org very shortly with more detailed information very soon.
I think the deepest motivation of correctly setting your online/offline state is to allow the blockchain to adjust internal parameters related to the cryptographic sortition.
The sortition has some optimal expected values that want to achieve for safety, and your total population size should be tuned correctly to make the math work within those expectations. In particular, if a specific set of tokens are sampled to participate in the committee, we try to assume that all of them will be online for voting.
This doesn’t mean that the online stake should be 100% accurate since some thresholds will still make all this work. In the worst case, this would affect liveness but not safety.
I think that’s why setting your online/offline status correctly is essential, even if your case is offline stake. You’re helping the blockchain calculate better the sortition (in both cases).
This is my interpretation.
Really good, succinct, run-down, I love it.
While we’re building up explanations, I’ll add my own, the casual one I usually give people:
Marking stake as Online means: hey, network, expect to hear votes and stuff from my running node, send me votes and blocks and I’ll think about them, etc.
Marking stake as Offline is like putting up a Gone Fishing sign: it’s helpful to the network to know that you won’t be around to vote on stuff, that your stake shouldn’t be used when calculating majorities, and stuff like that.