How to attest Steem account on Byteball without asking the fee from someone?

Before you continue reading this post, I want to remind all new Byteball users that you should always backup your seed words (Burger menu -> Settings -> Backup wallet seed). If you have also done the attestation or got any private assets like blackbytes then you should also do a full backup (Burger menu -> Settings -> Full backup). You should do full backup regularly after every attestation and after every time sending/receiving private assets.

This is my third post about Official Byteball Airdrop to Steemians (it loads slowly on Steemit, so you can open it on Busy.org), it's a blog post which has over 2000 comments and because of that, it takes forever to load or browse it. It was posted on 12. July 2018 and it explains how Steemians can attest their account and get free Byteball Bytes as a reward based on their Steem reputation.

Then came Friday (the 13th) and 10 out of 12 Byteball witness nodes crashed, one of the 2 still working witness nodes (they were upgraded earlier to new software version) was also a Steem attestation bot, so it kept doing attestations and without other witnesses, DAG database became more complicated and slower with unconfirmed transactions. There are more details to it, but this is just simple overview of what happened.

One of the reasons why there was suddenly so many unconfirmed transactiosn was because Byteball introduced a possibility to send unconfirmed funds. Every attestation attempt asks a user to send a fee (49 000 Bytes) and when sending Bytes on Byteball, user needs to pay for the cost of transaction (around 588 Bytes), so around 50 000 Bytes is a needed amount of Bytes for attestation. Cost of transaction is exactly the same amount of bytes that it takes to store the transaction in DAG database.

Attestation fee is there to cover the cost of running the bot:

• posting a attestation profile to DAG database.
• sometimes it can also cover the cost for human to review the documents - like it is for Real Name Attestation bot.
• sending the attestation reward and referral reward.

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This meant that in order for users to do the attestation, they needed to get the Bytes first - easiest way to get the Bytes was to ask other users who already got the reward, but this also meant that there is now total of 5 or more transactions:

• User posts their address to comments of Steemit post.
• Somebody sees a new user asking a fee and sends it to user, so they can become referral.
• Someone else also sees the address in comments of Steemit post and sends more Bytes without checking the address with Explorer first, hoping also to become referral.
• User sends the fee to attestation bot.
• Attestation bot posts the attestation profile to DAG database.
• Attestation bot send a attestation reward profile to user.
• Attestation bot send a referral reward to referring user.

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This, with the combination of crashed witness nodes grew out of hand very quickly. Also, at the same time, amount of comments to that Steemit post also grew very fast and started growing even faster when Steemians started having problems with the bot, many times asking same questions over and over again because it was so difficult to browse all the comments to get the answers on Steemit. Everybody should use Busy.org (my referral link) instead.

Also, there has been reports some people not receiving referral rewards when they payed it some address posted in comments. It seems there might be already bots out there, which scan Steemit comments and fund these addresses automatically, so the referral payment thing is little bit like lottery too.

So, is there a way to do the attestation without asking somebody to be the referral?

Yes, there are actually even 3 different ways:

• There is Telegram quiz bot about Byteball that rewards you with enough Bytes to do the Steem attestation.
• Steem atestation bot also has a alternative "Request to sign message" option, which enables user to prove the ownership of the address by signing a message and this is done without sending any Bytes.
• Third option needs a little bit patience, but can be the most satisfying because you can do good with computing with it. So, in order to get some free Bytes, you would need to find a "World Community Grid linking bot" from Byteball Bot Store, join World Community Grid, download their application and run it for a while (or even days). The next day, same bot will reward you with Bytes for the computational work that your computer did.

So, you don't need to post your address to Steemit to be able to do the Steem attestation, you can stay totally private while doing the attestation.

How much WCG points do I need to get the minimum amount for Steem attestation?

WCG distributon was disabled for a while because GDPR issues, but now this distribution method is relaunched again with higher rewards. This means that for every 100 000 WCG points, you will recieve $1 worth of Bytes or $1.1 if you have also joined the Byteball.org WCG team. Since $1 is worth 7 714 859 Bytes at the moment, you would need 155-170 times (7714859/50000) less than that, so that's around 600 WCG points (100000/165). Payout for work done on World Community Grid is usually done once per day.

But why should I even pick the public attestation then, what is the point of this airdrop, just free Bytes?

Public Steem attestation enables others to send Bytes to your steem/username address without the need to remember your long Byteball address. Also, some bots (for example, Real Name Attestation bot) could offer discounts for Steem attested users and this discount can be based on your reputation. So, once your Steem reputation grows higher, it might make sense to do the Steem attestion again (there is no reward doing it second time). You could also make a donation link for your steem/username address, so Byteball users could use this tool to send you certain amount of dollars worth of Bytes (requires wallet version v2.4.1 and above).

I have multiple Steem accounts, can I attest other ones also on same device?

Yes, but you will need to have multiple user accounts on same device.
Windows 10 lets you make local accounts without Microsoft account, but they are not backed up in cloud then.
Android phones also have option to have multiple users on same device, but you need to have a separate Google account for each user to access Play Store to download the Byteball wallet.

I got the rewarded Bytes, what now? How can I get STEEM or Steem Dollars (SBD) for it?

If you are good at predicting sport event results then you could use your knowledge in P2P sports betting.

You could also do the Real Name attestation, this means that you will attest your identity with your ID or passport and after that you could take part of ICOs on Byteball that require KYC (know your customer).

If you are not interested of anything Byteball related and you only care about Steem then you can send the Bytes to some cryptocurrency exchange and exchange the Bytes there to something else:

• Bittrex has GBYTE/BTC and STEEM/BTC pairs.
• UPbit has GBYTE/BTC, STEEM/BTC and SBD/BTC pairs.
• There is exchange bot in Byteball Bot Store too, but that's only with BTC pair, so I haven't used it. Also, be aware that when exchanging GBYTE to BTC, don't forget that maximum at once is 1 GBYTE (Byteball) and minimum is 0.001 BTC (Bitcoin). This tool will make it easier for you to check if you have enough Bytes to sell.

Just make sure before sending, that these exchanges don't have one of the deposit/withdraw wallets in maintenace mode, this can happen when wallet software is being upgraded (like it happened after Byteball full node wallets got fixed).

Feel free to ask more questions, some of them got answered already in previous post and there are many questions also answered in this post.