Welcome to the second 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:

Marketing

Perhaps the biggest news lately, but at least the most anticipated, is the appointment of a PR & Marketing Director. Conceptually and development wise Byteball is often praised as perhaps the best project of them all, but marketing wise it might make the shortlist for the Crypto Golden Raspberry Awards. This is all going to change now, Eli Taranto has joined the Byteball ranks. He has a strong track record in marketing, business development, and investor relations.

Eli is currently working on a marketing/action plan, with the aim to engage Byteball into becoming a bridge between the crypto and the real economy. In his own words:

“We will be updating everyone shortly — not with approximation and abstractions but precise actions to be taken.”

Really looking forward to that. I am sure I am not alone in this :)

Events

The other permanent non development member of the Byteball team is Steve Safronov, he’s responsible for business development. Together with Eli he gave a presentation about Byteball for the World Crypto Economic Forum in San Francisco on January 15–16.

Tony himself (the founder and lead developer) held a talk at the Altcoin Meetup in Zürich, Switzerland on February 2. The meetup was organized by the Bitcoin Association of Switzerland.

The contents of that presentation are even better than the one Tony gave in Amsterdam so I’ll try to make a nice recap of it for Medium when I find the time. Sorry for teasing. Supposedly a video recording was made as well so as soon as I get my hands on it I will link to that as well of course.

Textcoins

Last time I talked a lot about this brilliant new feature that allows you to send Bytes to anyone through e-mail or chat messages. Read this excellent article if you missed it somehow. With textcoins Byteball avoids widespread transaction difficulties, and reduces the sheer amount of things you have to do to send or receive crypto. Byteball became the first to offer human friendly, simple transactions in the crypto sphere. Using the PayPal model, without the third party keeping the funds, it is a complete peer-to-peer transaction. I said you would be hearing more about it soon, so let’s see what happened since.

The Byteball team sent out textcoins worth ~$10 to all 1000 participants of the World Crypto Economic Forum conference. This was paid from the undistributed funds. And it is also one of the new distribution methods that would be announced after the holidays.

On top of that all subscribers of the Cryptocoin.News Newsletter received textcoins worth ~$5 on Friday, January 26.

Of course I played around with textcoins myself as well so I made a new puzzle as part of my experiment to do fun stuff with this feature.

ALREADY CLAIMED

This time somebody wrote a script to solve it so it didn’t take very long before it was claimed. My next puzzle will be much harder and impossible to code a solution for. Uhm, I hope. So keep an eye out for that.

Identity Layer for ICOs

Byteball can be a lot of fun but it also allows you to perform very serious business. Byteball announced that they teamed up with Jumio to offer optimum KYC checks for ICO transactions, providing ICO operators with reassurance that the people they are doing business with are genuinely who they say they are.

Tony Churyumoff, Founder, Byteball, said this about it:

“By partnering with Jumio, we bring identity to the distributed ledger, both for ICOs and other financial transactions, creating strong connections between the crypto and the real world. For end users, we offer them a sovereign identity that is totally private, secure, and incredibly easy to use. For businesses, it is an opportunity to build applications that leverage the identity layer that were not possible before.”

Now, Byteball provides this option out-of-the-box, and it is incredibly easy to use for both the end user and the ICO issuer.

No other ICO platform can do this.

Read this Medium article to learn more about it.

Distribution to verified users & referrals

So now that we have both textcoins as well as attestation it would be foolish not to put them to use. So the Byteball team came up with a way to get the snowball rolling. Every new user who successfully verifies himself for the first time will receive $20 in Bytes from the distribution fund. With $8 you have to spend for verification, it is net $12.

Furthermore, once you have verified yourself, by referring a new user, both of you receive $20!

Read this Medium article to learn more about it.

It’s all very new and not without errors so if you want to try it here is some advice:

Read the instructions. They are long but everything is important.

Two most frequent mistakes:

1. make sure you are in a single address wallet. If not, switch to one. If it doesn’t exist, create it. Fortunately, for all new users, the main wallet is single-address by default.

2. use a document with your ID in Latin characters. Some countries (e.g. China, Russia) have their national ID cards with the name printed in the national language only. They don’t work. Use your driver license or the passport you use to travel abroad.

When scanning your ID, make sure there is no glare from reflected light, especially if your ID has a glossy surface. Otherwise, Jumio can’t read it.

Also, when you are referring someone, be prepared to babysit them a bit to ensure the best experience.

Stress test

User @seb486 on our Slack ran a stress test on February 8. It’s the first of its kind so keep that in mind. He basically sent wild simultaneous posts to the DAG. He used several batches that were increased gradually. I’m sure he will do a write up later. Here’s a really, really short summary.

The good news is that we reached up to 17 transactions per second (tps).

For comparison

The bad news is that the biggest batches made the network go down to ~5 tps. So the network could be prone to a Denial of Service attack. Also good news is that none of these tests crashed or made the network fail in any way.

Stress tests have been a long requested thing by the community for a long time so I think you will be very pleased to see these first results. Tony has said many times that the current Byteball implementation is not speed optimised so don’t take away from this test that Byteball doesn’t scale/isn’t fast enough. Consider this test and the current state of the network as a starting point from where we can optimise further in the future. It’s not at all needed at the moment, we’re nowhere near full capacity.

Fun-coins Faucet

As we all know by now Byteball has many, many awesome features, but you have to spend your Bytes to try them out and some of us might hesitate a bit to try the more advanced stuff like conditonial payments or textcoins “risking” real tokens. Wiki keeper and Slack user @Slackjore came up with a great and fun way to play around with assets on the Byteball platform called the Fun-coins Faucet.

Fun-coins are tokens on the Byteball platform that:

exist in vast quantity, like 10¹⁵ units

are readily available to anyone for free

are free of as many restrictions as possible

are designed for practice with various platform features

have zero current and future monetary value because they are not scarce, so

no-one needs to hoard them!

Risk free and fun!

You can get Tangos, Tingos, Zangos and Zingos from the fun-coins faucet in the Bot Store, right from the wallet.

Read the wiki article for more information.

Translators wanted

User @Punqtured on Slack has taken it upon him to manage the translation efforts needed to make the Byteball website and wallet truly multilingual. If you want to help out read this post and start contributing!

Airdrop?

So two of the new distribution methods are known now: through textcoins at events and through mailings by trusted parties. Everyone wants to know now if we still get an airdrop in March. Sorry, I don’t know :) Rumour has it that an announcement will be made in the week of February 12. So, have a little more patience please.

That’s it for now. I could have included a lot more but the reading time would go to ridiculous levels so I’ll just stop here. Don’t forget to check out the Byteball subreddit and join the community. See you next month!