My Experience Using Byteball app

Hey, I guess you are having a good day. Today, I'm going to be relating my experience with Byteball, what I think about the project and areas I feel they need to improve on. I actually fell in love with the project some months back.

Repository

https://github.com/byteball/byteball

What is byteball?

Byteball is a cryptocurrency platform that uses Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) technology. This is quite different from the blockchain technology. Although both uses distributed ledger, a DAG doesn't have blocks.

This thereby solves problems associated with blocks, like scalability (number of block size) issues, mining issues etc. Other projects using DAG technology includes IOTA, RaiBlocks and IoT Chain (ITC). Although they make use of DAG, they are not ideal competitors of Byteball.

I got to know about the project early this year, to be specific July 12, 2018. To promote the project, they gave out coins (often called Bytes or GBYTE on Exchanges) on steemit reputation basis. Steemians were required to attest their usernames on the Byteball app. It was more of an airdrop, even steemit's official blog talked about it. The steem attestation is still on.

_{• Screenshots from Steem attestation bot}

Steem Attestation Rewards

I am not usually one who signs up for an airdrop, I feel most of them are used for phishing (to steal personal details). On one occasion, a friend of mine received a mail that someone attempted to sign into his gmail after he signed up for an airdrop. So I try to be cautious and avoid airdrops that are unverifiable.

On seeing the fuss around the steem attestation, I was amazed. Even popular Steemians, Steem witnesses and Whales were watching out for Byteball addresses. They needed to send a required amount of Bytes for the attestation, so that they can get the referral rewards. I said to myself, "I definitely should try this one out".

I downloaded the app from playstore, dropped my wallet address on @punqtured's post - Official Byteball Airdrop to Steemians. On that day, this post was as busy as a market place. Voilà! Followed the entire procedure he mentioned in the post. And yes, my bytes were then sitting in my wallet. I also noticed referral rewards were sent to my referral's address.

I thought about accumulating some Bytes, so I referred a friend I met minutes after I got my rewards. He got his attestation rewards almost immediately. Sadly, I didn't get any referral rewards. Then the next day, I told everyone in a steem community I created.

I sent about 10 of them from the group bytes required for attestation. I encouraged them to send to others in the group too, so that almost everyone in the group would eventually get referrals as well. Sadly, again I didn't get any of the referrals. Although I felt bad about that, I was happy everyone there got their attestation rewards.

Customer Service

I later joined Byteball's group on telegram. I noticed some other members of the group had similar complaints. Since people were already complaining, I didn't bother to say anything regarding the missing referrals. Few days later, they posted a link to a form for users that didn't get the attestation rewards or the referral rewards. The form contained only spaces for a single account, so I filled it multiple times with the details of those I referred.

I got an email from the User Acquisition Manager - Casper Niebe (@punqtured), confirming that the problem was from their end. He promised to send my query to the lead developer, who was away at the time. We chatted a few times. After some weeks, I finally received my referral rewards.

That's a good customer service. Listening carefully to problems that users bring forward and being alacritous to find a solution.

_{• Screenshots from Send and History tabs of the Wallet}

Wallet / Transactions

If I am to compare Byteball's wallet to that of IOTA (probably the biggest competitior using DAG technology), Byteball would win. Mosts IOTA wallets for smartphones are still in beta phases. Byteball's wallet is really responsive and fast. My wallet synchronises within 3 seconds. I use the light wallet, because the full wallet takes time to load - as it loads the entire transactions on the ledger.

When it comes to transactions, IOTA takes the lead. Not because the transactions are faster, but because it is free. The transaction charges on byteball is minute and understandable, but generally, people prefer free things, who wouldn't? However, since both of them have had transaction problems in times past, none is flawless. I still remember Byteball's adoption period. Just few days after steem attestation was initiated, they allowed the spending of unconfirmed funds. It resulted in problems that were later solved.

_{• Adding a co-signer to the Wallet}

Security

The wallet is secured. I like the the multidevice wallet. Let's say for instance I want to send some Bytes to another user, I can set the number of signatures needed. I can set my laptop as a co-signer (as I have Byteball wallet on it), then sign the transaction there before it will go through. It's more like an authentication service.

Exchanges

As an investor on the platform, I'll definitely be interested to see Byteball in good exchanges. For now, bittrex is the only popular exchange GBYTE is listed. Cryptopia has a very slow and poor customer service, they hardly reply mails.

When Byteball was down for a few days due to wallet upgrade, it took months before Cryptopia began trading GBYTE again. Byteball also has a low volume on exchanges and low liquidity (due to daily trade with regards to market cap). As low as 500GB sell order would affect the price.

_{Image by Tumisu on Pixabay.}

Decentralisation

Byteball is actually not decentralised yet, since all 12 witnesses the network has is controlled by the lead developer - Tony. According to their road map, the decentralisation would start early next year. One reason I like the cryptospace is because of decentralisation, there are so many benefits. I would be anticipating to see how this would be actualized on Byteball.

Use cases

The Byteball team wants it's coin to be used in day to day activities, by merchants shops around the world. When I bought some Bytes during it's recent dip, I was actually thinking about real life adoption. It would be difficult for shop owners and investors though. Anytime they do an airdrop, the price of the coin crashes further.

From a small research I did in July, I discovered the price was around $1,000 early last year. Now it's about $42, what a difference! The smart contract for a year used for the steem attestation didn't really help much, and the plan is to give out 99% as airdrops. That means they have to do all airdrops, before they can actually scale outside crypto-sphere hehe.

Marketing

The Byteball team is really working hard in the development aspects, with new updates every now and then. Yet, they have neglected an important part - marketing. Seems it is deliberate, they feel a good software will sell itself. Yes I agree, the software is great. I love the concept, but you have to leave your comfort zone to get the word out there. They need to do social media campaigns and Ads if possible.

Conclusively, Byteball is an awesome project I'll encourage everyone to try. They have a solid development team behind it, but have to work on onboarding new users without crashing the price. It's also like a charity coin, since the plan is to give most of the coins through airdrops. They recently started a new distribution of Bytes - Introducing Smart Vouchers: A New Way To Earn Referral Rewards By Sending Bytes To New Users

Glad to see you made it here, Cheerio!

Official links

• Byteball
• Byteball Wiki
• Byteball's Telegram
• Byteball's Slack