Welcome to the third monthly Byteball update in 2018. If you missed the previous recap it can be found here.
For those of you who don’t know anything about Byteball yet, I recommend you to check out the website. Even better, read the whitepaper. Still have questions? Check out the wiki.
Alternatively you can check out this introduction series right here on Medium:
Introduction to Byteball — Part 1: Why?
Introduction to Byteball — Part 2: The DAG
Introduction to Byteball — Part 3: Smart Contracts
Introduction to Byteball — Part 4: Adoption
For those of you already familiar with Byteball, here we go:
March & all future airdrops cancelled
The most controversial news for sure has been the announcement by lead developer and Byteball founder Tony Churyumoff that the March full moon airdrop was cancelled. So far the great majority (65% in 10 rounds) of the Bytes distribution has been done through this innovative mechanism. People could link their Bitcoin address to receive free Bytes every full moon. Bytes holders were also encouraged to hold on to their Bytes as they also got 10–20% for free every round.
At first this distribution method was a great way to get people who were already involved in the cryptocurrency space interested in Byteball. At some point however the method started to show huge diminishing returns, not justifying the cost anymore. A few new methods of distribution were developed but they needed time to come to fruition. Tony therefor felt he had to plan a final tentative airdrop for March in case the new methods also weren’t satisfactory. He waited till almost the last possible moment (2 weeks prior to the airdrop) to announce the cancellation.
Let’s just say the news wasn’t exactly celebrated, some even say it was a PR disaster. Even long time fan Richard Heart was so dismayed that he started to tweet negatively about Byteball. And he wasn’t the only one, some long time community members ragequit and sold all their Bytes. Let me try to summarize the criticism:
- Lots of people invested in Byteball just because of the airdrops. The airdrop was advertised for months, you had to really read the smallprint to understand that it could be cancelled at any time;
- Keeping 35% of the undistributed Bytes without a concrete plan how they will be distributed is very sketchy and scares away investors;
- Changing the plan without any discussion shows how centralized Byteball really is, no better than an ICO where the developers keep 35% of the coins;
- TL;DR: Trust issues!
But the future is bright
As a long time fan I am obviously very happy that Tony made this difficult decision. Obvious to me, maybe not to you, so let me try to explain why cancelling the airdrops is perhaps the best thing that could happen to Byteball besides organic user adoption.
Tony’s vision, as laid out in the whitepaper, is crystal clear to me. He is extremely ambitious. Byteball is barely 1 year old. Distribution is nowhere near finished, decentralization still has to happen and new features are being churned out like clockwork.
Anyone who zooms out a little can see that this is the most impressive crypto project of them all, especially considering it’s mostly being built by a single genius coder who luckily cares more about actual users than so called investors. So what is it that makes me love Byteball so much then? I’ll try to summarize it here:
- Byteball is designed from the ground up as a better version of Bitcoin in every possible way, yes even security wise. In theory ofcourse, Tony is busy building all this;
- He has the understanding that you should focus on user adoption and user experience instead of speculation/exchanges. This is the only way to reach long term success;
- Currently Byteball is capped at roughly ~15tps max but no time is wasted on speed optimization yet because the network is nowhere near capacity at the moment, so that would be a waste of time, better to work on new features. We know it can scale;
- He understands that Byteball is meant to be used in the real world instead of “HODLed till moon”. So some kind of trust is not bad, extremism is bad. You can still be swindled with your 100% trustless currency, because the physical world does actually exist. So why not integrate with it! Witnesses are a brilliant solution to bond the real and virtual worlds;
- Marketing, whatfor!? The basics aren’t even finished yet, why start screaming already? Marketing to get active contributors involved, yes!
So once all of this is done, a few years from now probably, Byteball will turn into:
- The most feature rich, extremely fast (at least x100 from now) crypto platform you can imagine with insanely low fees that has millions of actual users;
- 12 high profile real world witnesses, like Jumio, Bittrex, Amazon, Tesla, Wikileaks, UNICEF, etc. providing decentralization and security;
- Many useful chat bots and integration in many web front ends / web applications as a backend system.
That’s what I believe in and why I have bought some (a lot) GB on top of what I got for free.
Everyone that learned about this project before November 2017 had a chance to own a part of this for FREE, Tony never asked anyone to invest in it.
Now that the groundwork is almost finished and actual ICOs can be run on Byteball it’s beginning to make sense to buy some Bytes to actually use it, so why give everything away for free to the people who already got so many. It just doesn’t make sense. So from this whole vision it’s super obvious that the airdrops must stop, they will destroy the vision when continued.
I don’t think I will convince many of the people in the first group but at least I tried. Let me know in the comments on which side you stand and why.
New distribution methods
So, no more airdrops, how do we get new users then? Luckily Tony developed a few promising new methods:
Most of these methods are quite new and the user adoption path is ofcourse way harder than the “free money” route, but if we can get this ball rolling the result will be far greater than the airdrops could ever achieve. And Tony isn’t stopping here, more methods will be added in the future.
New ICO on the Byteball platform
Quite a surprise was the announcement of a new ICO on February 15 called SilentNotary. SilentNotary is a digital notary that saves and certifies documents, emails, chats, and audio/video recordings.
The authenticity of these records will be ensured by posting them both to the Ethereum blockchain and the Byteball DAG.
The ICO is active until 15 March 2018. If you’re interested you can find the “SilentNotary ICO” bot in the Bot Store. You can buy SNTR tokens with Bytes, BTC, or Ether.
By the way, the ICO bot now supports KYC and non-US attestation making Byteball the only ICO platform (that I’m aware of) which supports KYC out of the box.
Save the best for last
Overlooked but awesome news nevertheless is the fact that developers can now access almost any function of headless Byteball node via JSON-RPC.
Previously, only a small subset of functions was available through RPC.
This allows to easily integrate BB nodes with programs written in languages other than node.js.
Can’t wait to see what becomes of this!
No marketing news?
A few things are brewing :)
I bet next month this recap will be full of marketing / PR news.
That’s it for now. Don’t forget to check out the Byteball subreddit and join the community. See you next month!
