There has been a lot of speculation about whether Byteball had thought everything through when launching the Steem attestation campaign. Please rest assured, we were very aware of the different types of abusive behavior we would potentially come across.

However, we also wanted the opportunity to be as easy and inclusive as possible. Restricting to only high reputation levels would have prevented a lot of users from participating, so we instead decided to start out as wide as possible and monitored the situation closely.

When the abusive behavior reached a level where it no longer made sense to continue, we moved in to change it so that only accounts created prior to July 12 were eligible for rewards. We also halved the rewards for lower reputation level, to reduce the profitability of buying reputation boosts.

Enter the days of referral hijacking

Since a few days ago, we started seeing the first signs of referral hijacking. As soon as someone sent 50,000 bytes to someone else, scripts picked that up on the publicly visible DAG and immediately sent an amount closer to the amount needed to pay an attestation and a transaction fee. While we had thought this would become a problem much sooner than it did, it has now reached the point, where it is almost impossible to refer others by sending them funds to pay for the attestation.

Referral links are king now!

Therefore, we now introduce the next change of rules, and remove the attestation fee. From the time of this announcement, the one providing the new user with the referral link will be the one receiving the referral reward.

Why not do this from the start?

As previously stated, we wanted to start out as wide and inclusive as possible. We also needed the word to spread fast and to make sure enough bytes got sent into in circulation.

Help science and earn Bytes

With a lot of Bytes in circulation, we would like to point to some of the fun and interesting things to use it for. There is also ways for you to earn even more Bytes while doing good for the environment, humanity and science. I would therefore like to direct people’s attention to another ongoing way of distribution, that provides a win-win-win situation. By contributing to the World Community Grid — a distribution method which we recently relaunched with new reward rates and bonus for team members — your computer’s idle time will be used to provide scientists and researchers help in fighting diseases and environmental problems.

Sports betting

There are also other ways to grow your stash of Bytes. By providing trustless P2P betting by the use of Smart Contracts, the Betting Bot found in the Bot Store provides users with a chance to bring a little extra excitement into their preferred sport, by allowing you to place bets on your favorite sports team.

Binary betting

If you are a super skilled trader and think you are able to predict the price movements of various cryptocurrencies, you also have a chance to put your money where your mouth is. The Binary Betting site provides fast and fun action for everyone feeling lucky or with the skills to predict markets. You can bet on BTC continuing a downwards trend or on Ethereum to start climbing from its current price point. The site is beautifully integrated with Byteball wallet features, and makes betting super easy and convenient.