Inside Digibyte – The Most Scalable Cryptocurrency

What is your background? Do you trade?

I originally started mining, I tried my hand in trading last year around the time that DigiByte had been sitting around USD$0.01-0.009 for quite a while. Wondered how well I could do off day-trading.

I managed to lose around 40,000 DigiByte being totally unaware of what I was doing. Many regrets were had.

In 30-60 seconds, What is Digibyte?

DigiByte is a fast blockchain that believes in on-chain scaling and security. DigiByte had the foresight to avoid many of the problems that are currently plaguing Bitcoin. Speed, scalability, centralization. DigiByte is the fastest, longest, most secure and most distributed UTXO blockchain in the world. DigiByte is not just a method of storing and exchanging value, but has the scalability to handle so much more, such as notarizing documents into the blockchain, identity validation, or even having tokens built on top of it without having to worry about a cat-game slowing it down when it reaches peak enthusiasm.

Why 5 mining algorithms? Isn’t there a “best” algorithm that could be used? If someone wanted to mine at home, what would be the most profitable way for an amateur to mine DGB?

Best is a funny concept. Best at what?

Best at total hashrate? Seems like a way to talk about a fast but weak algorithm.

Best at being mined on a GPU? There is, but, security isn’t just GPU miners, ASICs have their place at providing security through hashrate

Best at being ASIC mined? Sounds like centralization that Bitcoin / Litecoin have, where 60%+ of the network hashrate comes from 2-odd pools in the same country.

By having 5 algos, we can swap one or more out at a time and ensure the network ticks along happily, but we can ensure we have the distribution, decentralization, security, and speed. DigiByte has the best of all aspects.

With 15 second block times, are there a lot of orphaned blocks? Or do the multiple algorithms mitigate that?

Thankfully not, thanks to DigiSpeed. I believe the original testing in 2015 achieved 12 seconds without an increase in orphaned blocks / wasted work, however, I think that 15 seconds was chosen due to bandwidth usage at larger block sizes, as the “best” choice. I don’t recall the specifics of it all, but I’m recall the real-world testing, over the internet, which was slower back in 2015 too (And rather expensive to test like this as well).

Anyway, orphaned blocks even at this speed aren’t an issue.

What makes DGB unique from other digital currencies? Does it have something that it does better than any other coin?

DigiByte does most things better! If you have Bitcoin as a long-term store of value, why would you use a blockchain with 2.5 minute or 60 second block timings for a transactional currency, if you could use one that has 15 second block timings?

Why would you risk growth on a blockchain that has well under 100TPS, when you could use one that has 560TPS with future growth to 280,000?

What other coin has security at its core, thanks to both the multi-algos, and the speed, and the decentralization, all while not being an ICO or a centrally distributed coin?

Is Digibyte’s code based on Bitcoin or another currency, or was it developed from the ground up?

DigiByte was forked from Litecoin, originally using Scrypt, which in turn was forked from Bitcoin. Similar to Vertcoin / Dogecoin etc.

After all the forks and changes, DigiBytes codebase has diverged significantly though, especially when you consider it was only in August last year that Litecoin finally caught up to the same core wallet codebase that Bitcoin uses. DigiByte was using it those improvements before even Bitcoin officially had it released.

Who develops DGB, and why should we care who Jared Tate is?

You shouldn’t, just as you shouldn’t care who I am. I don’t matter. Jared matters as the founder, and the fact he’s a “known” person, but he’s also humble enough to know that the true spirit of a decentralized blockchain means that it’s not one person who should control the blockchain. He’s got the advantage over Satoshi in that people know that he doesn’t control 1.5m Bitcoin which could cause issues if they ever flooded the market, but although he’s still the lead developer, incredibly talented programmer, gifted speaker, all around nice guy, and an incredibly humble person.

However, he’s also a blockchain visionary, and has stuck with the product over the past 4 years of development.

DigiByte isn’t just developed by him though, there’s people who’ve come and gone over the past 4 years. That’s totally fine, it’s to be expected with a decentralized product. There’s even people who are active contributors but want to remain anonymous. DigiByte has some incredibly talented people contributing.

Is Digibyte a corporation, a foundation or what is the governance model?

DigiByte is an open-source decentralized blockchain. We have the Foundation, but, we aren’t the be-all and end-all authority. Rather, we’re a group of people dedicated to spearheading the development, project, decentralization and security of the project.

From totally volunteer/non-profit projects, all the way to fully corporate owned, what is the best governance model for blockchain projects?

There’s obviously benefits to both ways.

Being centralized and owned by a corporation means they’re going to have a bunch of money behind them for things like marketing, advertisement, development, running servers etc

Volunteer / non-profit is the most fitting though, for the long-term health and stability of the project. Sure, there’s no money for PR, but, it also means you don’t have a company centrally distributing the tokens, you’re not lining their pockets.

This also then has additional benefits that expand from there, but it’s safe to say I’m not a big fan of one company owning 60% of a cryptocurrency.

Digibyte is a top 75 coin by market cap today, and it has tons of features. Is Digibyte competing to be number one? Should Digibyte be the most used and most valued blockchain in the world some day?

If you sort by mineable, we’re in the Top #20, so it’s worth noting how many centrally distributed coins are in the Top 100.

DigiByte isn’t competing to be #1, there’s enough in the blockchain space to go around and DigiByte doesn’t need to have the biggest market cap. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it one day being one of, if not the most used blockchains in the world. We certainly have the scaling for it.

Who is DBG’s main competition?

The main competition would probably be the centrally distributed tokens that so many people are buying into with the intent of getting rich quick. ICOs have a 60% failure rate in the last 9 months. What I don’t want to see is people getting scammed by things like Bitconnect, or a failing ICO. I believe in the long term prospects of cryptocurrency, and so while I have absolutely nothing against day-trading, I know that most day-traders can take care of themselves, and know what they’re getting themselves in for.

As much as we compare ourselves to Bitcoin, Litecoin, Vertcoin, Dogecoin even, we have nothing against them and we believe that at the end of the day they’ll also likely be around where many other coins have failed.

Digibyte seems like the best candidate for so many use-cases. Should there be other coins in the world, or can Digibyte replace everyone?

I’m actually so glad you noticed. Especially with all the things that have been going on with Venezuela, the hyperinflation of their currency, we believe that our low fees, fast block timing, scaling, decentralization, distribution and security mean we’re an ideal candidate.

However, we’re not likely to do zk-SNARKs in a hurry, so if people want something like that then we’ll no doubt see things like XMR / Zcash sticking around.

As boring as it sounds, we aren’t interested in being the last man standing. We are interested in seeing the blockchain used to its fullest potential. It has the power to change the world!

Bitcoin has been notoriously slow to develop while alts like Digibyte come up with excellent innovations. People commonly say that alts exist to feed ideas to Bitcoin. What are your thoughts on that? What is your opinion of Bitcoin?

Technically we’re based on Bitcoin, via LTC. We also regularly incorporate the benefits from their wallets in to ours. For example the segwit addresses / transactions are currently committed to Bitcoin, but we’ve already managed to get the code ready for the prime time, and are going to have the Core Wallet released soon enough with those improvements.

We’re an open-source blockchain, and there’s nothing preventing the advancements that we’ve made in DigiByte also in their blockchain. Just as we helped DOGE implement DigiShield which saved them from Multipools, and it’s now used by ZCash, Monacoin etc, we share the code in an open-source manner so that others can benefit. It’s part of the underlying community, underlying ethos and “spirit” of the blockchain that we try to uphold.

What would absolute success look like for Digibyte? Acceptance at Amazon? The entire world economy using the DGB standard?

Absolute success is making a difference, seeing the blockchain used to its fullest. Not just in terms of currency, which only plays a small part of a UTXO blockchains true potential, but also in terms of security and verification.

There are some MAJOR advancements we can make in the online security world, and DigiByte can solve a huge number of the underlying issues.

DigiID would probably be right up there on the list. Being able to use a public / private key authentication method to verify identity with websites will alleviate many headaches, not just for users, but for online website / company operators also.

Is DGB a utility token or is it a currency?

DigiByte is neither. Token has too many negative connotations with ICOs etc

Currency implies we’re limited to money / wealth transfer and storage

DigiByte is probably better described as a “digital asset”.

What is the biggest misconception about Digibyte that you wish you could change?

It’s probably two-fold

That we’re an ICO, and that we’re centrally controlled.

People presume the Foundation is loaded with money because they’ve got the idea that every token is an ICO. It gets a little repetitive explaining that I do all this for free, that I’ve never been paid by the Foundation, that we don’t have oodles of money in the bank that can be used for marketing / development / servers. I do this because I believe in the project.

Then there’s the centrally controlled aspect. There’s nothing stopping somebody contributing to DigiByte, and to be honest it’s how I got involved with the Foundation. I saw a need, so I started a website to help people get into mining. I began to help out in the telegram channels. Help out on Reddit. Offer my time. Anybody can do this kind of thing that I did, volunteering their time, their skills, their abilities. Anybody can help, anybody can contribute, and we welcome that.

Do you have retailers who accept Digitbyte natively?

Yes, a number, and in fact some of them have since the very beginning in 2014. The number grows daily, but I’d be even more excited to see people building on top of DigiByte, and DigiByte being used for security purposes.