What is Byteball?

It's a chat-based directed acyclic graph (DAG) cryptocurrency which means it's not a traditional blockchain. You can do some really interesting things with it like conditional payments, prediction markets, P2P insurance, P2P betting, and chatbots for commerce which can be programmed and listed in their chat bot store. It also has a feature called Blackbytes which enable people to send transactions anonymously. As far as I know, there is no standard exchange offering these Blackbytes and you won't find their value listed on coinmarketcap, but you can purchases them using Byteball tokens in a chat-based exchange.

Learn more at https://byteball.org/

Here's an example of me playing Zork through a chat bot someone made. :)

Are they worth anything?

Here's the current price on coinmarketcap:

What's this distribution all about?

Basically, if you own the private keys of your BTC addresses, you can prove your ownership to the Byteball transition bot by signing a message for them. Based on the amount of BTC you've linked, Byteball and Blackbytes tokens will be distributed to your Byteball wallet.

From their website:

Free distribution to BTC and Byte holders.

Mass adoption requires wide distribution, that's why 98% of all bytes and blackbytes are to be distributed for free.

Part of the Bytes will be distributed as cashback for purchases at the merchant stores we partner with. In most cases, the offered cashback is 10% of the purchase amount. Contact us if you run a store or a payment processor and want to be part of the cashback program.

The rest of the distribution is split into multiple rounds and in each round holders of BTC and Bytes are rewarded. The amounts you receive are proportional to your proven balances in BTC and Bytes on the next distribution date:

For every 16 BTC you receive 0.1 GB (1 gigabyte = 1 billion bytes),
For every 1 GB you receive additional 0.1 GB.
To prove your balances, install the wallet and chat with the Transition Bot (you find it in the Bot Store in the wallet). The bot will help you link your Bitcoin and Byteball addresses by making a micropayment or signing a message.

You also receive blackbytes in proportion to your linked BTC balance and your balance in Bytes on the linked Byteball address.

Here's how the distribution has gone so far:

• 1st round on Dec 25, 2016: 70,000+ BTC linked, 10% distributed;
• 2nd round on Feb 11, 2017: 121,763 BTC linked, 1.8% distributed;
• 3rd round on Mar 12, 2017: 129,139 BTC linked, 2.0% distributed;
• 4th round on Apr 11, 2017: 145,441 BTC linked, 2.3% distributed;
• 5th round on May 10, 2017: 207,672 BTC linked, 2.9% distributed;
• 6th round on Jun 9, 2017: 453,621 BTC linked, 6.6% distributed;
• 7th round on Jul 9, 2017: 949,004 BTC linked, 11.0% distributed.
• 8th round on Aug 7, 2017: 1,395,899 BTC linked, 16.0% distributed.

Total distributed supply so far: 52.6%

The next distribution is in 16 hours. That means if you want to be part of it, you need to link your BTC addresses in the Byteball transition bot before then. It's pretty easy, especially if you're using something like a Ledger Nano 2. Just be careful to sign the right addresses! I missed out a bit on the last distribution period because I signed an address which no longer had bitcoin in it (I had made a transaction and the leftover bitcoin went to a change address instead of the original address).

If you have your bitcoin on a paper wallet and want to participate, you can import your paper wallet into Electrum and sign the message using that. Those steps are outlined in this post here: Step By Step: Getting Your Bitcoin Cash out of a Bitcoin Paper Wallet.

Should you participate in this distribution?

That's a question I'll leave up to you. I don't know if Byteball will have long term value or if it'll be worth nothing in the future. If you only have a small about of BTC, it may not be worth your time or effort. That said, free money is free money, but doing this also links your BTC addresses together, and it's always possible someone is using tools like this to keep track of active bitcoin users. There's also a risk whenever you take BTC off a paper wallet if your computer isn't secured (more on that in episode 3 of understanding blockchain freedom: Safety and Security).

Either way, I wanted to let you all know about this opportunity in case you hadn't heard about it or you forget when the next deadline is.

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UPDATE:

It seems they significantly changed the distribution ratios this time:

You now only get a tenth of what you would have gotten from previous rounds. Based on what I see there, you'd need 160 BTC to just get 1 GByte. I asked about this in the Slack channel and was directed to this Bitcointalk thread which says:

For the next distribution on September 6, we are changing the ratios in favor of Byte holders and slowing down the distribution to have more time to build out the cashback program

The goal seems to be to incentivize merchants and customers to actually use Byteball tokens instead of just holding them or holding BTC.

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Luke Stokes is a father, husband, business owner, programmer, and voluntaryist who wants to help create a world we all want to live in. Visit UnderstandingBlockchainFreedom.com

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