You have a couple misunderstandings of how this works. Let me make it a bit clearer, as your questions are fairly common: First of all no, you do not need to be running your wallet continuously 24/7. You could unlock it for minting once once a month, collect your interest based on the age-weight of your stake, and close the wallet. Note that unlocking is a 'mint-only' command, meaning transfers out from your wallet will still require a password. Just encrypt the wallet, open it when you wish, sync, unlock and stake for a few hours, collect interest. It's that simple. The only advantage to frequent or constant minting is that the tiny amounts mature and become viable for stake themselves - hence compounding of interest. Hope that helps clarify.
thanks, yes that clarified a lot for me.
(*) something like that explanation should become part of the wallet client! Took quite some time to find this info.
more questions:
(*) now I have unlocked the wallet, with
walletpassphrase PASSWORD 9999999999 true
Does it need to be renewed when I close and reopen the wallet? Is there a chance to make that persistent?
* Before I didn't use that command, but the wallet was not encrypted. Still, no Stake incoming, for ONE WEEK now!
So the 7 days in which my wallet contained coins are useless, just because it wasn't encrypted?
* You should consider to make the stake earning completely automatic. Or have a button press solution (like with the mining tab in some qt-clients).
I guess the price for BC also fell so much, because some people were simply disappointed that their balance didn't increase at all.
* Is it really only 1% per year? I could have made so much more, just by selling my BC in the right moment :-(
I am keeping all of my BC still, I really want to see this working.