Byteball Interview (Part 1): Crypto of the 3rd generation, Witnesses, IOTA vs. BYTEBALL
For me, Byteball remains one of the most interesting cryptocurrencies around. On Facebook, I had posted about the upcoming Byteball distributions on several occasions and was regularly asked ‘Why Byteball’? In the current crypto world, where every day a ‘this-changes-everything-token/coin/ICO’ is published, I find Byteball’s almost silent delivery of results without much fuss to stand out.
Often, with many concepts and ideas, we forget that innovation is not in the announcement but rather in the implementation. Not to mention the importance of user adoption. I asked the Byteball Community Manager CryptKeeper (Bitcointalk.org username) for an interview. Thank you again for answering my questions. The interview will be published in two parts on btcgermany.de.
Presentation
BYTEBALL Community Manager CryptKeeper
BTCGERMANY: How did you get into the crypto world and Byteball?
CRYPTKEEPER: I’m a bitcoin and altcoin investor and enthusiast since 2013 when I bought my first BTC and NXT, and then other crypto-currencies like Ethereum. I followed this project with fascination from the start. Somewhere I have a printed copy of Bitcoin Magazine in which the co-founder and author Vitalik Buterin wrote interesting articles. Time passes quickly. Since September 2016, I have been the biggest fan of Byteball and I am making myself useful in my spare time as a community manager and fund trustee.
BYTEBALL Interview — Part 1
Byteball is often described as the 3rd generation cryptocurrency since Byteball does not use a blockchain like Bitcoin, but rather the concept of a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Can you explain the most important differences in a few sentences and how this concept has proven itself in the first year of Byteball?
We all know the current forks of the Bitcoin protocol: the resulting coins ‘Bitcoin Cash’ or ‘Bitcoin Gold’ are certainly well known to many people. The reason for these forks is the required update of the Bitcoin blockchain to lift the limitation of a defined block size -currently 1 MB- in which the Bitcoin transactions are stored. Since a Bitcoin block is only created (mined) roughly once every 10 minutes, the maximum number of possible transactions is very limited. The transactions are prioritized according to the amount of the paid transaction fee and included in the block. But if the block is full, you have to wait for the next block. Depending on the amount of the paid fee and transaction volume, you may have to wait for several blocks until your own transaction is included. This problem has now reached such proportions that many Bitcoin users have been demanding faster transaction processing for some time now. Bitcoin developers are trying to come to grips with two solutions: on the one hand, a kind of ‘compression’ of the transactions (SegWit) to place more of them in a block; on the other hand, doubling the block size from 1 to 2 MB.
Byteball pursues a radically different approach: get rid of the blocks! No blocks - no restrictions on the number of transactions. The underlying protocol is called DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
Byteball has the following advantages over the Bitcoin blockchain:
• due to the DAG technology used, a transaction gets confirmation from Byteball peers almost immediately, because you don’t have to wait for a Bitcoin miner to mine a block
• transactions do not have to fit into a block; the DAG can expand infinitely wide when many transactions are pending
• unlike Bitcoin, where the number of confirmations can only be used to calculate a ‘probability’ for the validity of a transaction, Byteball has a deterministic finality
• dramatically lower energy consumption compared to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work because no miners are required
The finality of Byteball transactions has proven to be especially useful, as there are no longer any ‘confirmations’ to be counted! Once a transaction has been confirmed in Byteball (this takes from 30 seconds to several minutes), the transaction is completed and irreversible. However, in order to experience the benefits of removing the block restriction, you have to have a large number of simultaneous transactions. This is rarely the case with such a young project like Byteball. However, each of the monthly airdrops produced a large number of transactions and this worked out well. Byteball has often been praised for the smooth running of the airdrops and this also shows that there are no more bottlenecks.
Cryptocurrencies are also about trust in software and mathematics, not people and middlemen. What role do the so-called ‘Witnesses’ play in the Byteball system?
The witnesses are a special feature of the Byteball protocol. Since the DAG chain does not have a secure timestamp (or block number), the peers need a reliable source of transactions that are guaranteed to be generated in a defined order. This prevents transactions originating from a fraudulent fork (a so-called shadow DAG) from being confirmed. In addition, you can recognize double-spends (double payment with the same coins). There are 12 witnesses in Byteball and the default setting in the wallet currently refers to 12 witnesses all operated by Byteball chief developer Tony (Anton Churyumoff). As airdrops are still being carried out and a large number of coins are still in Tony’s hand, this is acceptable. In the future, however, these witnesses will be operated by a more varied group of users. And it clearly makes sense that those users disclose their identities because of the position of trust. But the time is not ripe for it yet.
It is often mistakenly claimed that the witnesses represent the entire consensus of the Byteball system. But this is not the case! Rather, they form a kind of ‘central path’ through the DAG chain by generating serialized transactions. No more and no less. Therefore, one has to trust the witnesses only to the extent that they generate these transactions in the correct order. One single witness would be enough to achieve this. The number 12 has been selected to compensate for occasional failures of individual witnesses. The number 12 is also low enough that you won’t lose the overview when selecting Witnesses from a list of operators later.
IOTA and Byteball are both currencies of this 3rd generation, with Byteball offering more features (assets, smart contracts, private blackbytes). However, IOTA’s focus is in other areas due to the free transactions. Still, worlds currently lie between the market capitalization of IOTA and Byteball. Does Byteball want to develop towards the focal points of IOTA in order to compete with the success of IOTA?
Byteball has put the user at the centre of its attention from the very beginning, as can be seen, for example, in the user-friendliness of the wallet beginning with the first version. IOTA, on the other hand, targets IOT (‘Internet Of Things’) applications, with the focus on feeless transactions. Even though the fees in Byteball are already extremely low (currently well below 1 cent per transaction), there is no plan to eliminate them in order to occupy the IOT niche and compete with IOTA.
If not, where does Byteball see its market and how does Byteball intend to assert itself against the strong competition within the cryptocurrencies?
Byteball has many advantages, such as its advanced DAG technology, which fundamentally solves the scaling problem of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. In addition, the airdrops have already provided us with a good distribution of the coins and thus a large user base. The functions already mentioned in the whitepaper will be implemented step by step. More real-life applications are to be promoted, the beginning is already made with the Byteball Cashback Program (https://medium.com/byteball/byteball-cashback-program-9c717b8d3173): dealers and service providers can apply for a refund of 10% of the invoice amount in the form of bytes to customers (cashback). If you pay directly in bytes, even 20% is possible. The ICO from Titancoin (https://titan-coin.com/en/) is the latest addition to the Byteball Wallet, where you can purchase assets of a titanium dioxide manufacturer via a chatbot directly in the Byteball wallet. Further applications are already in the works.
BYTEBALL Interview Part 2 - the technical strengths, blackbytes, distribution rounds and the cashback system (22 November 2017 on BTCGERMANY.de)
(English translation of https://www.btcgermany.de/byteball-interview-cryptocurrency-altcoin/)
