Welcome to the first 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.

The benefits in short: Byteball has a user friendly wallet, it’s fast, has no PoW/PoS yet is still 100% trustless, very active development, extremely strong privacy through Blackbytes, human readable smart contracts that actually work already (insurance, prediction market, lottery, betting bot, blackbytes exchange, altcoin exchange, etc.), a fair distribution, and a limited supply.

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:

Happy Birthday Byteball!

Byteball just turned 1 on December 25 which is almost unbelievable when you look at the amount of features already released.

Textcoin

The most awesome feature release in my opinion was the release of textcoin in version 2.0 of the wallet. But just a few weeks later in version 2.1 we got some more amazing additions:

The ability to send all public assets as textcoins, not just Bytes

An option to create paper wallets for cold storage through textcoins

$ amounts in the display of wallet balances, transaction history and fees

The fees are particularly important. Many people were trying to state the dollar value of Byteball fees and almost always they were 2 or 3 zeros off. The rates are updated from Bittrex and Freebe (a Blackbytes exchange) every 5 minutes.

Example of $ value

So now we have even more options to distribute Bytes and assets and you can see what the value in dollars is of what you are sending and how much it costs to send it. So start experimenting with it please. Send your friends & family some textcoins, create your own assets and send them out to your friends for instance. I know I am! Did you see the Byteball Crossword Puzzle I made as a textcoin experiment?

SOLUTION

I’m working on improvements and variations. In fact I have so many ideas for textcoins that my head is almost exploding.

To help me and others take advantage of textcoin ‘Byteball help’ wrote this amazing guide on how to mass send payments as textcoins.

I’m sure that once the world is going to experiment with this we’re going to see some crazy stuff. In my opinion textcoin is absolutely brilliant.

Adoption

Rafael made a Byteball Video Faucet over the holidays which brought in about 2.000 new users! All they had to do was leave a comment below the video and they would get 5.000.000 Bytes from Rafael to become a Byteball Millionaire for free. Rafael is from Poland so he did a Polish video as well as an English one. Pretty awesome way of showing the power of textcoin.

New Android installs because of Video faucet

Bot development

The bot developers have been busy as well. Papabyte (of sport-betting-bot fame) released a CFD trading bot. You can sell or buy financial derivatives for a selection of cryptos (for now BTC, USDT and Monero) that are priced in Bytes with a leverage up to 5x. In his own words:

“You can try to beat the market or take financial coverage for your holdings. Trades up to 10MB are free from commission, trades above this amount have the same fees as Bittrex (where the bot places orders for hedging) but as advantage you can buy a contract without suffering from book order spread since the price used is an average of last trades. Although no promotion has been made, there are already quite a lot of trades made and I’ve got good feedbacks. Have a try !”

Short USDT, I dare you!

You can find it in the Bot store of course.

ICO bot

The ICO bot now supports BTC and ETH, meaning you can pay in BTC or ETH to buy a token issued on the Byteball platform.

The first ICO on Byteball is Titan Coin. A new token, attached to the cost of 1 kg of ilmenite concentrate. Ilmenite concentrate is a valuable ore for titanium and its derivatives. Check it out if you haven’t already.

Now, almost all pieces are in place to become an ICO platform.

Naming registry

Another missing piece of the puzzle was a way to assign human readable names to assets issued on the Byteball platform. Peter Miklos, who also runs the Byteball Asset manager operates the registry. You can read the registration policy here. Peter can explain all of this much better than I can so make sure you read his article: Byteball asset registration and issuance under the hood.

Once a name is registered, it becomes visible in the wallet, if you updated to a recent version that is.

Zwibs will become collectors items for sure

Community

Our subreddit is growing slowly but steadily, we’re above 2K members now and in December we had 100K pageviews for the first time.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the name Byteball, the logo and the lack of marketing. Reddit user blockchain was getting tired of it and made a plee to the community to come together and act instead of complain. Definitely worth reading if you haven’t already.

So now we have our own “Byteball Jesus” :) He tweets a lot!

Another very nice community effort is a contest by user slowmoon to get people to describe why they love Byteball, you can still enter till January 15, 2018. 18:00 GMT.

Coming soon

Everybody’s waiting for the new distribution method that was promised. The good news is that it is ready! But, to make it better noticed, it will be launched (and announced) after the holidays. A little bit of patience please :)

That’s it for now, thanks for reading!