Let's make this really simple,

I use only 1 wallet for staking (you can have multiple address in one wallet). I have another wallet where I send my mining coins and purchased ones. I used that second wallet so I don't have to many "small" blocks in my staking wallet and when I have a big enough amount I combine those smaller blocks and send them to my staking wallet (keeping the number of blocks in that staking wallet relatively low).

Start from your overall balance and divide by 10.  It's a quick rule of thumb and you shouldn't have to combine blocks for at least 2 months. And in two months, you don't have to start all over again, you can move gradually and combine newly minted coins into bigger blocks.  You can keep the same address or pick a new one, a new wallet or the same one, it doesn't matter.  I use the same.

For example,

your balance is 10,000 HBN you'd make 10 x 1,000 HBN blocks
your balance is 5,000 HBN you'd make 10 x 500 HBN blocks

Keep in mind this doesn't have to be perfect, but starting with 10 blocks, you'd have ~640 Block in 2 months, that's when you should think to combine them again.
Also, if you already have some age or weight on your current coins, you can wait for them to stake and move them right after that, so you are not resetting the coin age and losing the PoS rewards on those coins. (You will need to use the coin control feature for that).
You will likely always make more than 2% since it will mostly always take more than 10 days to stake.  The PoS reward is based on coin age (number of blocks it takes before successfully getting your PoS block). So you don't lose for waiting longer and thus the reason for having slightly more than 2%.  The max interest per year is set to 100%. That is hard coded and the same for all.

Having a fast CPU doesn't matter if you have a lot of blocks... they will consume all of the CPU power and get your client less responsive.

Also, there is a distinction between BLOCKS and TRANSACTIONS.  having a lot of transactions is fine.  I have a wallet with over 25k transactions with no problems with it yet.  But I have no wallet with more than 500 blocks.  that is a pain to work with if you ever do.

I'd prefer 100% to reduce block download time from 7 hours to 1.75 hours (minimum).

Keep us updated on how the pi responds to this type of high block count scenario.  If a pi can handle this fine, any machine should be able to.

i dont understand the coin control, but i stake alot:

unless I am somehow misunderstanding the math/logic behind this, wouldn't you make more overall if you had many blocks staking for small amounts several times a day, rather than occasionally doing one medium or large block every day? Because the second you get a new POS reward, it goes back to work for you aging and then eventually staking again... earning compound interest in a sense.

BTW hashcows fixed the hbn withdrawal issue on the multi pool and I got my HBN!

The compounding effect is really no different with smaller blocks. In practice, it is less, because the smaller blocks have a lower probability of staking, therefore take longer for a given coin age: Although there are proportionately more of them, they are using more CPU power (pro-rata), and so there will be a slight throttle on the overall staking speed.

Mathematically speaking, a wallet with larger blocks that stake sooner will receive more HBN in the long run than a wallet with small blocks that take longer to stake, even though you are compensated for the extra days.  One major factor is that in order for large blocks to accumulate faster, you would need to combine blocks immediately after they stake, or else coin days are wasted.

At the end of the day there isn't a huge difference between the two reward wise. It is all about what makes you happy and what is fun.

Just use coin control to send the dust to another addy for reassembly then send them back as a contiguous block.

http://wiki.hobonickels.info/index.php?title=Coin_Control

The blocks mature at 10 days. After maturity they become eligible for stake, but they are competing with all other eligible blocks on the network.  The more stake weight the more likely it will be that the block will stake.  Currently my blocks of 500 are taking 10-15 days.  Random chance is involved.

Tranz,

Any thought on changing the algo to a more energy efficient one as well as ASIC resistant?  With the first ASICs shipping around the end of May, this might be worth considering for the early adopters as well as new small miners who don't have money to burn like the whales...