I'm mad I didn't hop on this cryptocurrency sooner!!! If you own Bitcoin there is no reason why you should not own Byteball. Why? Because every full moon (i.e once a month) they distribute FREE Byteball to bitcoins owners who link their byteball address!!!

What's the Catch?

From what I can see there is none!!! They could have went the traditional ICO route and raised money and distributed the coin but the developer decided to distributed GBYTE in a fair and open way. This pretty much allows anyone to get in without having to put up an investment except in bitcoin but you are not spending any of your Bitcoin.

From their bitcointalk announcement

There will be no ICO, no crowdsale. I believe the success of a currency depends on the number of people who own it, in fact Peter R’s research suggests that historical marketcap of Bitcoin follows Metcalfe's law: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=572106.0, i.e. it is proportional to the square of the number of active users. That’s why I want Byteball to be in the hands of as many people as possible:

What's So Special About This Coin?

Well for one this doesn't require you to go out and buy a $12,000 dollar miner. There are no blocks in Byteball only transactions. They use an interesting concept known as a DAG to process transactions and allow users not to have the complete ledger download to their wallet just to participate in the network.

From their bitcointalk announcement

There are no blocks in Byteball, and no block size issue. Instead, every new transaction references one or more earlier ones (parents) by including and signing their hashes. The links among transactions form a DAG (directed acyclic graph):

How to Get Your Bytes and Blackbytes

Download and install one of the following wallets.
iOS Android Mac Windows Linux

When you install the wallet you will be given a ByteBall address. Go the the Transition bot and start a conversation.

More detailed instructions are on their wiki and bitcointalk page

BTC to bytes: For every 1 BTC, 62.5 MB [0.0625 GB or 62,500,000 (white)bytes]
BTC to blackbytes: For every 1 BTC, 2.1111 x 62.5 million blackbytes (money supply of blackbytes is 2.1111 times as much as that of bytes)
Bytes to bytes: For every 10 (white)bytes on any Byteball address, 2 new (white)bytes
Bytes to blackbytes: For every 10 (white)bytes on a linked Byteball address: 4.2222 new blackbytes

How is it trading

Crypto mania makes it hard to get a handle on price/value but here are the numbers:
In January it was trading around $20 USD.
Before the July distribution it was trading over around $900 USD.
After the distribution it went as low as $350.

Now that is some volatility and if you bought in on the high point you are probably hurting right now. However I think that this is expected with free money people will sell. The same thing happened with Ethereum Classic with the chain split.

The Best Thing Going for ByteBall

Low coin supply. This is the main reason that Bitcoin saw its rise from less that half a penny to $3,000 in about 8 years.

The total supply is 1 million and there are currently only 365,903 is circulation. Once all Byteballs are distributed I see this going higher than Bitcoin in price. All of the coins should be distributed around some time next year so this will be a long term investment for me. The only investment (besides Steem) that doesn't require you invest it. Gotta love the crypto markets.

Conclusion

If you made it this far then you should seriously think about getting this coin. If you don't have the stomach to buy then just link your bitcoin address and move them in and out of your wallet once a month. I'm going to be doing both. This is a opportunity that doesn't come around to often.