| Byteball: Smart payments made simple | |
|---|---|
| |
| Introduced | 2016-09-05 |
| Symbol | GBYTE |
| Hash function | N/A (DAG) |
| Block time | N/A (DAG) |
| Block reward | N/A (DAG) |
| Coin cap | 10^15 bytes; 2.1111*10^15 blackbytes |
| Diff. retarget | N/A (DAG) |
| Halvening | N/A (DAG) |
| mintxfee | approx 500 bytes |
| Premine | all coins created at genesis unit |
| Announcement | https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1608859.0 |
| Website | https://byteball.org |
| Repository | https://github.com/byteball/byteball |
Byteball, listed on Coinmarketcap as Byteball Bytes, is a DAG-based cryptocurrency developed by Anton Churyumov.
DAG
Byteball data is stored and ordered using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than a blockchain. This allows all users to secure each other's data by referencing earlier data units created by other users, and also removes scalability limits common to blockchains such as the blocksize issue.
There are no blocks: there are only transactions. You just add your transaction to the end of the DAG yourself, without waiting for the miners to (hopefully) include it in some future block.
Features
Smart/conditional payments
The killer feature is the Smart/Conditional Payment. You set a condition for how the payee receives the money. If the condition is not met, you get your money back. This substitutes for trust between strangers because neither is able to scam the other.
This smart-contract feature has many real-world peer-to-peer applications, including:
- no-fee crypto exchanges
- sports betting
- selling or buying insurance concerning negative events like a flight delay.
Textcoin
One can send Bytes (Byteball funds) by email, even if the recipient is not in Byteball yet. The sender just writes an email address where he would normally write a Byteball address. When he hits "Send", his email app is opened with pre-filled text for the recipient. The sender can edit it before sending. The recipient receives an email with a link. Example:
Here is your link to receive 0.001 GB. https://byteball.org/openapp.html#textcoin?pact-volume-lazy-midnight-mix-cool-fiction-symbol-tag-fiction-coral-sibling
Blackbytes
Private payments can be made using blackbytes, a cash-like untraceable currency. Its transactions are not visible on the public database that shows all payments made with (white)bytes. Blackbytes are sent peer-to-peer instead in an encrypted chat session.
Chatbots
Chatbots are fun and facilitate real-world transactions, including shopping with a merchant and paying with two clicks. Current chatbots are: Flight delay insurance, Transition bot, Byte-BTC exchange, Flight delays oracle, Sports oracle, BTC oracle, Bounce bot, Rosie bot, Byteball Asset Manager, Zork | game, Poll bot, Blackbytes Exchange BEEB (Trustful^), Blackbyte Exchange [freebe] (Semi-trustless^), Buy blackbytes (trustless), Slice&Dice MUD, Betting bot (Semi-trustless), Luckybytes Lottery (provably fair), TitanCoin ICO, Byteball-Altcoin Exchange Bot.
^Note that in the cryptosphere, "trustless" is generally preferable to "trustful" -- the reverse of what one might expect. And neither word equates to "trusted" or "untrusted".
Platform
Byteball has its native currencies, Bytes and Blackbytes. It is also a platform for new assets (coins/tokens) you can create yourself at minimal cost in five minutes. You can simply send your asset to anyone with a Byteball wallet, or you can use your asset in many smart contracts. See the Byteball wiki article.