Why didn't Byteball use the referral links from the beginning?

After the latest announcement about the changes of Steem attestation on Byteball by @punqtured, I noticed some responses to "Why not do this from the start?" in the comments of the original post and in the comments of other posts following the announcement. So here is my view on this as somebody who has technical background in web development and who knows little bit how Byteball works.

Initially I planned to write how I got reputation 50 in 10 days because I posted long posts (684 + 1351 + 1374 words) about Byteball that explained what you can do with it and how I got very generous upvotes from Steemians to reach reputation 50 (last 47-50 were very difficult), but what prompted me to write this post instead was that some prominent Steemians (I am not gonna call names) took the credit of fixing Byteball referrals by saying that they forced Byteball to change the referral system by no longer "supporting" the airdrop (whatever their "support" means). They also said that how clueless Byteball team is about Steemit, claiming that Byteball team is not aware how Steemit reputation can be gamed. Reality is, Byteball has been keeping a close eye on ongoing distribution from the beginning and even the original post, which now has nearly 2500 comments said: "All rewards are paid in Bytes and may be subject to changes particularly for the lower reputation scores", so Byteball team was fully aware how Steemit reputation can be gamed and that might also made this airdrop as successful as it has been. This is not a first Bytes distribution for Byteball and it is certainly not the first distribution where people tried to game the system (most recent examples were when email attestation and real name attestation went viral in end of May 2018 because $20 is lot of money in Venezuela).

Fee/transaction referral system

Little background about referral system that was used and got changed a lot during these last 10 days. I first talked about how the fees were originally much higher and they were lowered to be accessible to more people via other methods that I made a blog post about. Also, this kind of fee referral system has been used on many previous Byteball attestations and is actually much better than cookie based referrals (I will explain that later in this post), but since the newest wallet got a feature to "sign the message" to validate user's ownership of their address, link referral system was also added for the first time to the attestation bot, but it acted just as a fallback in case fee referral was not found.

Automated account creation and reputation boosting

Another change was announced when Byteball noticed that people were creating new accounts and paid for upvotes to get them to higher reputation - this meant that it was now the time to change the rewards for lower reputations and limit the attestation rewards to only older Steemit users (prior the airdrop announcement on July 12). You could ask there, why now? Why not from the beginning? The reason is, if you worry to much about scammers from the beginning and built too many restrictions for real users with low reputation then it is less attractive to them and it has less chance to go viral, so you implement these changes as they are needed. Also, Byteball distribution goal has not been to distribute to those who have already plenty, it has been fair distribution to as many unique people as possible.

Referral hi-jacking and new link/cookie only referral system

The latest change that got announced now (21st July) is there to get rid of the fee/transaction referral hi-jacking. Short description what these hi-jackers did is that when creating new accounts was not profitable anymore, these scammers needed a new revenue model. They got more advanced and started listening Byteball DAG to see who is sending out the fee amounts and who is receiving the fee amount, so they also sent their own Bytes in more accurate amount, which caused Byteball to take their input instead and count these scammers as referral. That was not a problem before with email attestation (scammers on that one found their own loopholes) and real name attestation (fee is high and changing based on dollar price), but what was learned from these previous attestations/distributions were applied to Steem attestation (vested reward in smart-contract) and the next attestation/distribution method will take account what scammers are doing during this Steem airdrop.

So, why not do the link referral and signing the message from the beginning

You may have heard about cookies, you certainly have closed the notices about them from time to time because stupid EU cookie law, but most people still don't even understand what cookies are for. So, when you visit Byteball referral link, cookie is set in your browser, but cookies are not the most reliable thing, especially if you take account people who might use plugins that delete cookies when you close the browser or they just use incognito mode, which does the same thing. Also, cookies are not cross-platform, so when you visit the referral link on one device, but finish the attestation on another device or even another browser, cookies get lost. So, if you do not have scammers who listen your addresses on Byteball DAG, fee/transaction referral is better way to refer somebody, but unfortunately we can't have nice things because of certain people, who are always there if there is a possibility to get free money.
There is less technical reason to use fee/transaction referral system too - it demostrates one of the most core features of the Byteball wallet app, users and bots can request a payment from chat, transactions are published instantly and confirmed in 5-15 minutes.

Deep-link and invitation code referral system

Steem attestation has 2 more referral systems that are being used for the first time and which are immune to problems that transaction and link referral systems have, but these 2 are not perfect either. This system is sometimes called deep-linking or launch URI, it works by registering byteball: URI on wallet installation and when user clicks a link, wallet app gets launched with all the parameters that are included in the URI. Both websites (BB Odds and BB Convert) that I have built for Byteball, use these launch URIs too. Sounds like perfect system, but unfortunately these links don't work if the wallet application is not installed yet and it seems that not all blogging platforms support adding them to posts (at least Steemit and Busy.org do not, yet). Byteball wallet app also supports copy-pasting that code into device paring invitation field, but that can also be very difficult to explain to someone who is using the app first time, it is easier for the user to just find the attestation bot from Bot Store. There is now also a QR code generated for that launch URI, but only time will tell if accept that method.

Here is the definite way how to make sure that you get your referral counted with link referral.

• First you will want the users to download the wallet with your referral link, which looks like this: https://steem-byteball.org/#FZP4ZJBMS57LYL76S3J75OJYXGTFAIBL.
  -- If some users still have the Windows 32bit system then they need to click on Github link and download the 32bit version instead.
  -- This will set the cookie to your browser and if the cookie is still there when SteemConnect authentication URL opens in same browser then it will be counted as your referral.
  -- If user opened the referral on computer, but then installed the app on phone, referral is lost because your browser on your computer doesn't have the same cookies as the browser on phone.
  -- If user vistied referral link on non-default browser, but the app opened another browser, which was set default then the referral is not counted because different browsers don't share cookies with each other. I guess they don't like to share :P
• After they have installed the wallet, they should copy this and paste to "Chat > Add a new device > Accept invitation from the other device" screen: byteball:[email protected]/bb#FZP4ZJBMS57LYL76S3J75OJYXGTFAIBL (it can be made as a link on some websites too, but it seems that Steemit don't support application URIs).
  -- This will open the Steem attestation bot automatically and will tell the bot again who is the actuall referrer. So even if cookie might have been lost with first step, it will be counted because the app was opened with this referral link.
• Or you could just ask them to download the wallet from Byteball.org website and after successful installation, ask them to scan a QR code like this, which is now also provided by the bot:

So, let me know, how is the new link only referral system working for you. Does it work for everybody now? If there are still people who don't get their referral rewards then maybe this post will help you understand what might have happened and how Byteball has tried to minimize the risk for this to happen.

I hope that when this airdop mania blows over and if people have not already sold all their available Bytes then they might start to look around, what else they can do with cryptocurrency that has fully-functional wallet on all platforms. For those who like betting, I would suggest to take a look BB Odds or BinaryBalls.

So far, this is my personal favorite post about Byteball from @teamhumble.