Network issues over the weekend and questions about Steem attestations
What happened?!?
As you may know the Byteball network experienced issues July 13-15. Clearly the timing was not great given the surge in new users following the Steem release made on July 12.
The good news is these have been fixed. Technical details on what happened can be found towards the bottom of this article. But first, here are some resources for the many new users we have attracted from the Steem community.
Questions relating to Steem attestation referral rewards
Steem attestations resumed July 16. If you have a question regarding referral reward attestations please submit the details through this Google Form. Please do not post your question on Slack, Telegram, Twitter etc, as to investigate your query we need all the information that the form requests.Rumors and realities
After the announcement of the Steem attestation program, a number of rumors have spread and we would therefore like to use this moment to address some of them:
Rumor: The airdrop ends in a week/day/month!
REALITY: This is an integration from Byteball to Steem and not a normal airdrop. Byteball rewards a new user for connecting his wallet with his Steem username and this feature will be in the wallet software until it for some reason doesn't make sense. The rewards paid to new users for linking have no set end date either. The rewards are subject to change as already stated, but there is no need to worry that you won’t make it “in time”.
Rumor: The airdrop works only for some Steem users!
REALITY: No, the integration allows any Steem user to link their Byteball wallet with their Steem username. At the time of writing, users with a reputation score of 30 or more will receive a reward. But all the other benefits (reduced cost of identity attestation, possible bonuses from ICOs issued on the Byteball platform etc.) are eligible for everyone!
Rumor: The network couldn’t handle the traffic of all the Steemians wanting to attest
REALITY: The network load was nowhere near the load previously proven during stress tests. The Steem attestation bot, however, has been seeing a lot of traffic and therefore it may seem slow or unresponsive at times. It’s important to distinguish between the Byteball network and a bot running on a server.
Answers to some other common questions from Steem attestors
There have been a few questions about how to determine who is the referrer of another user. And it can get technical, but stay with me as I explain how the Steem attestation bot determines who the referrer is. First, there are two ways to refer another user:
Referral link given by the bot
This is a link generated by the bot, that you can send to others. When they click it, you will be the referrer of that user. But only if the user pays for his attestation with funds that weren’t sent to him from another attested user. In other words, the referral link is the least powerful way to refer other users.Sending Bytes to a new user
If you send funds from your Steem attested wallet to another user who pays for an attestation with those funds, you will be the referrer and get the referral reward. If the user already had funds in it , then how do you know that it was your funds being used? This can actually be tricky. The user’s payment to the bot has “inputs”. Those inputs are previous transactions going into the user’s wallet. So a transaction has inputs and outputs. The outputs of a payment to the bot will always have the bot’s wallet address as output. The inputs of the transaction is what determines where funds comes from. The system will track the inputs used in the transaction up to 5 steps back in the search for a wallet address that was already attested.Difficult questions
Question: What if a user clicked a referral link and paid with funds sent to him from another attested user?Answer: The user providing the funds will be the referrer, not the one from the link.
Question: What if there were multiple inputs from several attested users being used to pay for an attestation?
Answer: The input that is closest but not less than the output required will be the referrer.
Question: What if the user didn’t spend my funds, but instead signed a message?
Answer: Then then one providing the referral link will be the referrer.
Question: How on earth can I know any of this?
Answer: You can see all transactions on the Byteball Explorer - you can search for addresses and see ingoing and outgoing transactions of that wallet thereby allowing you to “follow the trail” just like the bot does.
Question: Where can I see attestations?
Answer: On Byteball Poke you can see all attestation bots and their number of attestations. If you click one of them, you can see the latest attestation units.
What actually happened that resulted in the network issues?
On Friday July 13, some of the witnesses crashed due to a bug. The witnesses that remained online were recently updated and didn't have the bug. For these witnesses the steem attestation bot continued to post transactions very fast. Due to a recent upgrade it didn't have to wait for confirmations, so the unconfirmed tail of the DAG grew very large.
The witnesses that crashed were updated and restarted. However, they started adding their units to the old part of the DAG that they last witnessed, which caused massive rebuilds of the main chain each time a new unit was added. This made validation of new units very slow.
The Byteball developers had to apply some optimizations that matter only when the DAG takes such an unusual form. These optimizations made validations faster but still much slower than normal.
When this was fixed, another issue arose: the calculation of the stability point gave unexpected results. The team had to investigate the new issue, which took another day. A mistake was found in the algorithm. The fix breaks compatibility with the old (flawed) algorithm, and makes the update mandatory for all full nodes.
On July 16, wallet version 2.4.1 was released which fixes crashes in full wallets. The update is mandatory for all full wallets.
Moving forward
A reminder, if you have a question regarding Steem attestation referral rewards please submit through this form but please wait at least 48 hours before reporting.
Relevant links
Byteball Slack invitation - To the official Byteball SlackByteball Wiki - Answers to all your questions and then some...
Byteball Telegram - To chat with fellow Byteballers
Official Byteball Website - Download the Byteball Wallet
Well, maybe you didn't crash but your post on Steemit almost makes the website crash...there are so many comments that it can be even loaded properly!
All jokes apart, thank you. You've opened my eyes to this project that I didn't know about before mostly because I found "byteball" to be a silly brand name. Now, I'm quite impressed by your tech and what you've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.
Free stress test for steemit. I hope @ned will do something about it.
Thanks. I really appreciate your feedback. Also, I'm sure a lot of people found it super weird to have a serious hi-tech computer company named after a fruit. I'm pretty sure they had to fence off some criticism on that name too. But as you've luckily come to realize, what matters is actually the product. It will take a bit longer to sell it if the packaging doesn't look good, but as long as the product is great, I'm sure the word will spread :)
If you are doing an Airdrop this big, you guys should have tested it out very well before rolling it out for the masses. Bots were easily able to take ref rewards of other users.
Also, I wanted to inform you that I gamed your system by creating new accounts. You guys should have restricted the Airdrop to at least 40 rep users (50 would be more ideal).
Common, show some concern for genuine people with 40 and 30 reps! Already, the reward for those's been splashed because of people 'gaming the system.' Suggesting they should be left out altogether isn't fair please.
There are other ways to verify people with lower rep, such as post count, powered up steem, account creation date, number of followers etc. They could use those to reward people with lower rep but who are active steem users.
But leaving exploits just to show "concern for genuine people with 30 reps" will make a bad impression on potential investors. This will affect the success of the coin.
We were very aware of all potential exploits from the get-go. As you say yourself, an airdrop of this size doesnt just happen over night and without careful thought. One thing i didnt foresee, though, was the internal debate in the Steem community about the platform not sufficiently preventing low quality content and spam of all sorts. The airdrop obviously caused quite a lot of users jumping through hoops for higher reputation, and apparently that hasnt been so pretty. I can definitely say, that our aim was to encourage higher quality and more engagement from Steem users.
All investors in Byteball are aware of the undistributed funds, and that all of it is to be distributed for free. I am sure that when the dust settles, this Steem campaign will have proven to be far more valuable than the initial airdrops to BTC holders. We have already seen impressive amount of content being created and people engaging on Byteball communities. Needless to say, some of the exploits caught the attention of developer communities like thebot.net and Utopian. Having developers become aware of a platform allowing anyone to build on top of it really isnt all that bad.
Hello ! @punqtured
Have problem ! please check the transaction ?
https://explorer.byteball.org/#/a59qPYGuaEdax/BccptyXaRaBp5bITOApKFJ9QiFsk=
I do exchange byte/BTC all its OK but btc not sended my bitcoin address please check sir ?
I m send -84.898.890 bytes to the address for btc exchange - OBZTPVTKTAUGQJJBYJJKLPP3BGJ4KNZQ
and btc's address - 1Avagb2cEgr56fuoRhzM8Wn3gMrNfmkKqZ
HELP ME PLEASE @punqtured
how do i export my private key on byteball wallet ? i need to store it in a safe place for future use...
thanks a million.
http://bfy.tw/J4eq
I downloaded the wallet with a different name instead of using my Steemit name.
What next? Should I try and uninstall the application and start over. (Tried that and it came back the same one.) should I just add a wallet?
I provided my email address before realizing I need to change my name to my user name in Steemit. @punqtured
Upvoting to move to the top. :)
What do you mean by downloading the wallet with different name? Also, where did you provide your email address?
I downloaded the wallet originally under a name other than the rebeccabe in steemit as I see the intructions say to do.
As far as the email. it asks if you would like to receive email updates once installed.
Tried to uninstall .. when reinstalling must be the same wallet.
I am just a contributor on Byteball. There is no way to "download" the wallet under your Steemit name. You just download it and install it and that's it.
If you mean that you named your device or wallet as some other name, then these you can change anytime:
But these names doesn't matter much, what is important is the Steem attestation with chatbot.
If you mean by "downloading under the name" as you already made a Steem attestation with other Steemit user then you need to do the clean install.
You are wonderful. Thanks .. I am going to follow you.
@tarmo888 apparently I missed something it must be the same wallet it did not ask me to name it or which wallet I want. It is the simple wallet. So I am not sure how to go about unintalling off my mac. Maybe just create an extra wallet. Waiting to find out what to do. As you can see I am not a techy person.
If you plan to create another wallet inside your current account, make sure it is single-address wallet because only single-address wallets can do attestations (the first "Small Expenses Wallet" created for you is already single-address wallet by default).
If you want more privacy then you can create an extra multi-address wallet, which is bettefor privacy because they are more difficult to track, but not impossible.
If you want to get total privacy then you can buy blackbytes and install TOR (configurable from Settings) to hide your network traffic.
My husband has a steemit account and I have another account in Steemit for photography. So when they apply can I get a referral from them? Can they be another wallet address? What is the best way to go about this? @tarmo888 So just create single wallets under mine for my other Steemit name and my husband?
You need to have 2 devices or 2 different users on same device in order to attest more than one Steem user, so they both would have a separate wallets. And then one can refer the other.
On Windows 10 you can have multiple users on same devices like this https://www.howtogeek.com/226540/how-to-create-a-new-local-user-account-in-windows-10/
What is cool about Byteball is that you could also make joint accounts, these are called multi-device wallets, where both of you have separate accounts, but you also have a joint account, which both of you can spend (or you could also make a wallet where it can be spent only if both sign).
thanks I will read this after more coffee...:) You are a great help
Anyone down to help a dude out with attesting my Steemit account? I will love you forever :)
MAIDZSDDPJ6F4A5Z3Q2KJEDUXDZX3PM5
Thank you for this information.
@resteem.bot
This is very helpful to everyone. Thanks a lot for working on this blog @punqtured, I'm resteeming this for more exposure.
thanks kuya I will cascade this to the others.
Cool. :D
very useful information, and I use to learn. thank you
But only if they used our referral download wallet link before - this is how it works for me at least.
The referral link is the fallback if no referrer can be found tracing back 5 steps on the payment used for the attestation. Any attested wallet found during the trace will be the referrer. Only if no attested wallets are found, the link will be used to determine the referrer.
Well, than I'm missing lots of referral rewards ;) (addresses from this post).
Then I've made another tutorial post with referral link to the wallet and started to receive few rewards (but still far less than referred users).
It's like the bot has problems with determinating the sender of the 0.0006 GB and the ref link helps.
Or maybe I messed something up? I've tried attesting two accounts on the same Byteball address ;) and then returned to the first one.
Did you check with Explorer if you truly were a first one to send the Bytes to new user?
Hah, maybe that's the case :)
Just got request for this address:
https://explorer.byteball.org/#7CC5QETO365SSCRUEGHQAFY5LK6ZYMBC
But someone was faster :) But for the most part I think I was first? Will check it for the other addresses, thanks!
In fact - it's seems there are users / bots that try to send the 0.0006 GB before anyone else (also under my tutorial posts) to steal the reward :D This kinda solves the mistery!
Yeah, maybe happens also in my comments too because I have not yet been able to send anybody the fee because every address I check, already have been funded, sometimes within 5 minutes after posting.
Too bad that they don't know that 0.0006 GB is clear overkill because they only need to send as much as 49 588 Bytes (or 0.000049588 GByte) :D
When the wallet chooses which input to use for a payment, it will chose the input closest to, but not less than, the output required. The input closest to the 49,000 + fees will be chosen. If there are two identical and equally close inputs, I think the latest input is the one that will be used.
What? But then this "whoever funds first" rule is not correct? You would also need to fund the most accurate amount too, which is 49 588 Bytes?
Can someone helps me increase my reputation to 40 and earn some more byte balls?
important and very helpful information, help me, in the last day there are many questions and it can not be answered, with this post would be very helpful.
thank you...@punqtured