A few people have been asking for an explanation of Decred's PoS system. Here it is
Two validation systems are integrated into the Decred blockchain, Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The PoW system (miners) create and validate new blocks added to the blockchain. The PoS system allows ticket holders (voters) to participate in verifying a block's validity. The PoS system acts as a 2nd authentication factor on the chain. If 3 of the 5 randomly selected ticket holders approve, the block is added. The PoS tickets are also used to vote on a change to the protocol (hard fork) over a period of time. Without support of the super-majority vote, the minority chain will become unsustainable due to invalidated blocks. /// Analogy: Imagine a toy car factory with machines (miners) that make toy cars. Each toy car produced is approved by 5 randomly selected quality inspectors (voters). If 3 inspectors approve, the toy car is good. If we want to turn the toy car factory into a toy boat factory instead (hard fork), we need at least 75% of inspectors to agree to this change over a 1 month period. Once that happens, even if we happen to have machines still making toy cars, it will be hard to find 3 of 5 inspectors that approve on building a toy car.
When I purchase a ticket and it votes:
1) How do I control whether it votes yes or no on the block it is called to vote?
2) if the block is not accepted due to a majority of NO votes, that also means I don't get the stake reward. Why would I ever want to vote no?
