[ANN] BYTEBALL: Totally new consensus algorithm + private untraceable payments

[vindyne8]

Do not forget, the next distribution round is scheduled for the full moon of March (12 March 14:54 UTC), the conditions are exactly the same as in the 2nd round.

https://byteball.org/

[CryptKeeper]

Version 1.5 released https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases

It's the biggest update since the launch.  It enables conditional payments, which allow you to P2P exchange bytes vs blackbytes since today.  Much more in the next releases.

Read my Medium article about making P2P great again https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p- ... .i6kj1ug99

Note that to bind your payment to a condition you must be connected in chat with the payee and click his address or accept a payment request.

Other updates in this release:
* Fixed frequent disconnects that might affect sync speed
* Small performance optimizations
* Multiple small bugs fixed

Please upgrade.  The wallet might start a bit longer than usual the first time after the upgrade, this is because it needs to upgrade the database, be patient.  

Be prepared for bugs since it is a big update (I guess you are already used to expecting this when you are into something new).

[vindyne8]

Don't lose track of time and forget about Round 3 of Byteball distribution! The next round is scheduled for the full moon of March (12 March 14:54 UTC)

[CryptKeeper]

Important security update 1.5.1 https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases

It removes a XSS vulnerability that allowed remote code injection via specially constructed chat messages.  Thanks @portabella for discovering the bug.
The update also includes a minor performance improvement.

Upgrade is mandatory.

To protect those who didn't upgrade fast enough, I'll update the default hub to refuse connections from clients that run an old version.

[CryptKeeper]

Byteball Community Announcement

The Byteball crypto project has done great so far. Tony, the chief developer, laid the foundation for this with his great invention and continuous hard work. But this project would be nothing without you - the users. Great ideas, testing, translations, marketing, so much was achieved by the community and it's invaluable! To reward those users who play an active role in the community and therefore accelerate the progress of the Byteball crypto project, a fund was created:

The Byteball Community Fund

Purpose
The Byteball Community Fund's goal is to support and encourage the Byteball crypto platform. Fund raising is done by voluntary donations from investors, stakeholders and enthusiasts. Donation payments are accepted in bytes, blackbytes and bitcoins. The fund will pay out bounties for byteball-related work such as reporting security vulnerabilities, software bugs, user support, marketing campaigns etc.

Security
As a security measure, both byteball and bitcoin wallets of the fund use multi-signature transaction confirmation. The trustees of the Byteball Community Fund are:

* Tony (Anton Churyumoff, byteball's chief developer)
* CryptKeeper (byteball's community leader)
* Marenkar (Travin Keith, board member Nxt Foundation)
* Durerus (byteball investor and adviser)

Any outgoing transaction needs to be confirmed by at least 3 trustees (3-of-4 multi-sig).

Project funding
Besides bounty payment for smaller achievements, the fund can also decide to support byteball-related projects. For most projects, the project leaders should seek funding by investors or organize a crowdfunding. Because the community fund supply is scarce, funding of such projects should be the last option sought and will only be considered if the project is important for the platform.

Decision-making procedure
As this fund is a community fund, byteball community members will be actively involved in the decision making for the most important issues and community feedback will be taken into account by the trustees.

Like the multi-sig setup implies, trustees come to a decision in an informal meeting with a simple majority.

Fund management
The goal of the community fund is not to gain profits by trading with the donated currencies. Quite the contrary, the fund must be managed in the most conservative way to avoid any risks! However it may be necessary to exchange one currency to another to maintain the fund's liquidity and to be able to pay expenses if another currency is required. The decision of whether a share of the fund should be exchanged will be decided by the trustees with a simple majority.

To maximize the effectiveness of the donations, the fund's wallet addresses will take part in the distributions of free bytes and blackbytes.

Accounting
Fund accounting will be as transparent as possible and detailed reports published regularly, though donors and bounty recipients can choose to stay anonymous.
Current fund balances: 8.47 GB / 3,303.20 GBB / 0 BTC

Donation accounts
If you want to donate, please use one of the following addresses:

For Bytes: KREOV5Y57FRWQKDHJ7BD3SFQBEVVPAG3

For BTC: 35Bpkq2EoadRAwjmiTabWXUTn15X8Z7aii 39zeGpu4nG6BqB9ARxd9xM9XThX9JCmx8t (new address)

You can also donate Blackbytes! In this case, please contact Tony or CryptKeeper, who will guide you through the process.

[vindyne8]

Some more Q & A from the main post on BCT forums here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1608859.0
Q = question from a poster.
A = answer from dev - tonych



Q: Is it planned to create a kind of development reference or maybe there is already a tutorial with which you can start? I have a developer background. That's why it can be very technical.
A: Start with this primer https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1617816 and the whitepaper section about addresses.



Q: Forgot to ask. I am looking for a tutorial how to exchange Byteball for BlackByteball with the new feature in version 1.5. When I understand correctly, the new version of Byteball wallet offers this feature now.
Can you please create a post or a blog entry for that? I would be very grateful.
A: If someone writes a tutorial, we offer a 0.5GB or 5GBB bounty out of the community fund.



Q: But my point is you can't prevent in the wild people from creating convoluted smart contracts even with your intended to be simple declarative language. Do you really expect users to give a damn and look at the source code of the smart contract? Users demand features such as DAOs. So I don't think you can stop the developers from bastardizing yours as well. Preventing Turing-completeness is very difficult. This is why Bitcoin is very cautious to add new opcodes.
A: I can't stop them but hopefully most developers are smart enough to find the best tool for the purpose, and there is no lack of choice. Even if they do create something convoluted against all odds, let's see if they find many users.



Q: Do you really expect users to give a damn and look at the source code of the smart contract?
A: I dare say yes, if we speak the user's language. The nice thing about Byteball smart contracts is that they can be easily presented in user readable form:



This example is from my article https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p- ... .3k1a7f5yo



Q: Although each executed instance of your language is not Turing-complete in isolation, the system of instances is Turing-complete because you have the ability to reference global memory in the form of the data feed. Thus you can still have scenarios of unbounded recursion and even live or dead locks.
Craig Wright had schooled Nick Szabo and Gregory Maxwell on this point also.
So you have not prevented hacks. And you have somewhat crippled the language compared to Solidarity. You may argue you've made the intent clearer, but when people write convoluted systems with this in order to achieve complex smart contracts by simulating Turing completeness, then it may end up more obfuscated than Solidarity. I really don't see your design strategy as the absolute panacea you seem to claim or imply.
A: There is a limit on the number of operations per smart contract, data feed lookups included.

It is not a panacea. It is designed to meet the demands of regular users, and they are not convoluted, as the recent superresistant's example shows.

If you need convoluted, go with Solidity, but be extremely careful when you expose complex systems to regular users (unaccredited investors, if we consider investments context). When users are exposed to complex systems that they don't fully understand and that can potentially harm them, the governments will want to "protect the consumer" -- by regulation.



Q: When I understand correctly, then conditional payments are like smart contracts, right? It is just another name for it isn't it?
A: Conditional payments is an application based on smart contracts.



Q: What i want to ask is:
- why chat messages are not the same
- sending another Bind payment will generate another subwallet?
- TX fees are doubled with this new feature, am i correct?
- Blackbytes balance of receiver wallet is splitted in GBB in main wallet + GBB "Also" in smart wallet, why not total amount ?

A: How did you test? Could it be that you had the same device on both sides of the trade?

Q: Main Device (PC) has 2 wallets , default wallet and Multisig (1/2) wallet -created later
1 Pc sending GBB + 1 Android mobile receinving GBB multisig wallet (1/2)
repeated test (5 GB for 1000 bytes), this time chat message says "payment 2364 bytes" , again 0.48 GB moved in a new address
A: That's what I expected - your PC was on both sides of the trade and it had difficulty interpreting the payment that had its addresses as both sender and receiver.



Q: - TX fees are doubled with this new feature, am i correct?
A: There are 3 transactions in total, if that's what you are asking about.
Q: agree about 3 transaction, why the third is not automatic?
A: The wallet never signs transactions on your behalf without your explicit request.



Q: - Blackbytes balance of receiver wallet is splitted in GBB in main wallet + GBB "Also" in smart wallet, why not total amount ?
A: Because spending of smart wallet is constrained by the smart contract conditions. You might be not able yet or already not able to spend from it.
If you can spend from it, you move its balance to your main wallet, this is the 3rd and final transaction.



Q: What happens if all 12 witnesses fell under DDoS attack? Will network stuck?
A: Their IP addresses are not publicly known, so it is not easy to learn what to attack in the first place. Even if DDoSed, a witness can quickly move to a new IP.



Q: I have plans to move my wallet to another device. Do I need to complete a full sync on the new device before restoring from full backup?
A: No, you don't, you can move it half-synced.



Q: The PC I'm moving my wallet to has never had any version of byteball software, so I'm syncing from scratch. It took about 12 hours to get to 69% and then it was stuck on 69% for about five hours. At this point, I closed the wallet and re-opened to see if it would help get me over this 69% hump. The wallet is back at 69% and it's been stuck for approximately six hours. Is this normal for a new install?
The PC I've been using since the initial 12/25 distro never became stuck at any point while syncing. Although, I was opening my wallet daily, since 12/25, so it may have never got stuck because I was syncing regularly.
Any insight would be appreciated
A: This is not normal. Your cpu and disk usage should normally be high during sync. If it is not, something is wrong, a restart usually helps.

You don't need to sync the 2nd PC before moving. As far as I understand, you already have a fully synced wallet on the 1st PC and since you are doing full backup that contains the entire database, you'll get a fully synced wallet after restore. The old data on the 2nd PC will be deleted during restore anyway.



Q: Does adding more byteball-hubs help the network process more transactions? Does a byteball-relay also help, but just doesnt store temporarily any private-messages like a hub does?
A: Just a little bit, as much as it helps distribute the load created by catching up nodes.
What the hub/relay are more useful for is their help in propagation of new transactions and in reliability.



Q: Why is Byteball called Byte on Bitsquare and not Byteball?
A: Byteball is a platform, Bytes is a currency. Same as Ethereum/Ether.



Q: I guess the upper practical limit is the 12 witnesses, how many transactions they can see (bot dont need to see it at the same time) and post to each other and append to the database, to the main chain.
A: Wrong. Witnesses don't do any more work than any other full node, they are not special with respect to TPS, and they are not a limiting factor in any way.



Q: There is nothing stopping you from making really a massive amounts of transactions on your own chain - and have it merged to the Main Chain when posting it for the witnesses to see. As long as you didnt double-spend, the verification of which witnesses do takes little time compared to what you spend in making the transactions, if all is fine, your chain of massive amount of txs will be in the main chain.
A: Again, this implies that it is witnesses who are doing verification and detect double-spends. Wrong - every full node does it in exactly the same way.

We use witnesses only to establish order of events by looking back in history.



Q: Thanks for clarifying that. The other concern that keeps coming to my mind is this: what happens if 2 or more of the 12 witnesses goes down (offline) for various reasons (hardware mulfunction, operator not interested in running it anymore, government seizure etc.). Will this cause any network disruption? If yes, what kind of disruptions would that be?
A: As long as the majority (7 out of 12) of witnesses are online and behave honestly, the network is healthy.



Q: Finally some voice of reason. I felt so lonely with my arguments among all "hodl, to the moon etc." mindless cheerleaders. Thanks for that. It would be nice to hear from tonych what is his plan (if any) for relinquishing control over witnesses and breaking down the current one man cartel. It's obvious that it's very early to talk about that but some plan needs to be outlined if the system is to be considered in the future something more than privately controlled currency by one man. It's so centralized at the moment that the wallet "decentralized value" slogan sounds like a joke.
A: That's a valid concern and freezal got it right: the network had to start centralized and no one's showed up yet with the needed reputation and credibility. I'm going to use every opportunity to relinquish control over 11 out of 12 witnesses in favor of reputable individuals/organizations/companies that are willing to be part of the network. That would make the network only stronger thanks to both their involvement and the network becoming more decentralized.

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/icocountdown/status ... 5605929984

[vindyne8]

Byteball round 3 distribution happens March 12 at 14:54PM UTC



What you need to know What's Byteball's website address?
You can find the Byteball website at https://byteball.org/

Does it have a whitepaper?
Boy, does it ever! A very robust 49 page whitepaper can be found here: https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf

What were the stats of the last distribution round?

The second round is now complete, bytes and blackbytes distributed.

Here are the exact numbers:

17,610.194028342 GB distributed (1.76% of total supply, +17.6% to the previous available supply).
New available supply: 117,610.194028342 GB.

86,658.346197160 GB were on linked addresses at snapshot time and eligible for receiving blackbytes.
37,176.880613233 new GBB (gigablackbytes) in circulation, out of which:
34,360.309831321 GBB distributed,
2,816.570781912 GBB go into the development fund.

Where can i see the amount linked for round 3?
You can check out the transition bot to see current total linked, and the transition rate: http://transition.byteball.org/

How do I participate in this distribution round?
Alfred has made a great and easy to follow step-by-step guide here: http://dailybyteball.blogspot.com/2017/ ... ution.html

How do I link my BTC address?
Alfred has made a great and easy to follow step-by-step guide here: http://dailybyteball.blogspot.com/2017/ ... s-for.html

Help! I'm not sure what to do and time is running out!?
Do not worry! Hop in the Byteball slack here: http://slack.byteball.org/
Once you are in, join the #helpdesk channel. You will find many community members here willing to help out those who are new to Byteball!

Then what am i waiting for?
Absolutely nothing! Go to http://slack.byteball.org/ and get started ASAP, well under a day remains to get set up!

But seriously folks, it's well worth your time to get your share of the Byteball distribution. Less than 17hrs remain to link up and get ready!

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 3889793024

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 6250416130

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/byteballorg/status/ ... 1914749956

https://twitter.com/byteballorg/status/ ... 6497501186

[vindyne8]

From this post by dev tonych: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... sg18177601

Distribution of bytes and blackbytes is complete.

Bytes:
19,832.186424596 GB distributed. New available supply is 137,442.380452938 GB.

Blackbytes:
36,779.346125354 GBB (giga-blackbytes) distributed
5,088.382635611 GBB added to the community fund (due to some bytes not being on the linked addresses)

The 4th round is scheduled for the Full Moon of April: Apr 11, 2017 at 06:08 UTC.

The rules stay the same:
BTC to bytes: 1 BTC of proven balance gives you 62.5 MB (0.0625 GB)
BTC to blackbytes: 1 BTC of proven balance gives you 2.1111 * 62.5 million blackbytes (money supply of blackbytes is 2.1111 times more than that of bytes)
Bytes to bytes: 1 byte on any Byteball address gives you 0.1 new bytes
Bytes to blackbytes: 1 byte on linked Byteball address gives you 0.21111 blackbytes

Between the rounds, expect more steps towards making P2P great again (if you missed the first step, see https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p- ... .snr320140).

[CryptKeeper]

Version 1.6 released https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases.

Now you can bind payments to events posted by oracles, see https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p- ... 8adfbde2a5.



One such oracle is already running and allows to P2P exchange bytes (or blackbytes or any other Byteball currency) vs bitcoins.  

The source code of the oracle is at https://github.com/byteball/btc-oracle.

The possibilities offered by the payments bound to oracle-posted events are huge, independent developers are welcome to add their own oracles that enable other P2P services.  See the above Medium article for some ideas.

Other updates in this release:
* Back button in Android now works correctly
* Chinese translation (partial)
* List of balances by addresses in settings (for those who like to look under the hood)
* After receiving a "message encrypted to unknown key" the undecipherable message is now deleted and the error does not pop up the next time
* Performance improvements

The first time you start the app after the upgrade, it may be slow to start as it creates new indexes for better performance.

Please upgrade.  If you run a full client (GUI or headless), you'll have to upgrade because of a bug in code that was never visited before but the first time the new functionality is used will trigger the bug.

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 4788956161

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 8873778177

[CryptKeeper]

Byteball featured on Crypto Times https://youtu.be/X5dP2Xh2eDk

[CryptKeeper]

Great video from Marc de Mesel again!

He mentions Byteball as "basically the only player out there using the new DAG technology" Shocked

Tweeted about it, please retweet: https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 9213977602

[vindyne8]

From the original post by tonych here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1608859.msg18309568#msg18309568

We need better translations.
Our wallet is only half translated, please help improve it:
- join github.com and fork byteball project https://github.com/byteball/byteball
- edit the relevant language file at https://github.com/byteball/byteball/tr ... er/i18n/po. You can use any text editor or Poedit, which is a specialized very convenient tool. If you translate only part of the strings, no problem, the wallet will still become better than before.
- submit a pull request

I recently updated the strings, now the .po files include the strings that describe recently added functions (bound payments, smart contracts, etc).

[vindyne8]

Byteball version 1.7.0 released - Prediction markets & more! Get it here:

https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases

New entry in the "Making P2P Great Again" series by dev tonych:

https://medium.com/byteball/making-p2p- ... 0d49c0abab

And last, but not least, Byteball is now available for trading here:

https://www.cryptopia.co.nz/Exchange/?market=GBYTE_BTC

Do not forget it's less than a week until Round 4 Distribution!



https://byteball.org/

[CryptKeeper]

Byteball is now traded on Cryptopia!


http://cryptopia.co.nz 
Exchange, Marketplace & Forums

[CryptKeeper]

Now you can also P2P gamble using smart contracts.



The oracle FOPUBEUPBC6YLIQDLKL6EW775BMV7YOH (which also monitors Bitcoin blockchain) posts pseudorandom numbers derived from Bitcoin block hash.  A new number is posted every time a new Bitcoin block is mined and gets one further confirmation.  The random numbers are posted under data feed name randomXXXXXX where XXXXXX is Bitcoin block number.

The numbers are between 1 and 100,000.  You can bet on a future random number being less than or greater than a specific value, for example, there is 25% chance that the number will be below 25,000 and 75% chance that it'll be above 25,000.

The above contract was between my Mac and my phone, it was created before block 460852.  This is the data feed that was posted by the oracle after this block was mined:
https://explorer.byteball.org/#Ns//o52E ... kB07vbpVA=
bitcoin_hash: 0000000000000000019dd457cf8e233701dab44ac855492d575a4366556213e0
bitcoin_height: 460852
bitcoin_merkle: GW9cQW5m0KLIi2suUlkzRP2yurg8jLEax3uHiun7kik=
random460852: 34789

34789 is more than 25000, the Mac won.

Join #gambling channel on our Slack http://slack.byteball.org/ to find a partner for P2P dice game.

P.S.  And we didn't need to do a $2m ICO to organize this simple game.

[CryptKeeper]

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 1938405377

[vindyne8]

Under 2 days left till next distribution, Cryptkeeper on point!

[CryptKeeper]

Marc de Mesel is a great guy:

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 0969577472

He's giving out free Bytes and Blackbytes, hurry up!

[CryptKeeper]

Version 1.7.1 released https://github.com/byteball/byteball/releases.  Upgrade is mandatory for full nodes. 

This release fixes the bug "known bad 3CxaZ7iziNbFjbif9O8bSmKbtXK6RDEbdKuoBmnig1s=" that was posted above.

Also in this update:
* improved French translation
* fixed a bug that could cause an infinite cycle and make the app unresponsive

The update is only for desktop, as the bug affects only full clients.


The distribution of blackbytes is still under way, I'll update you when it is finished (hopefully soon).

[vindyne8]

Round 4 distribution statistics:



Next Byteball snapshot for distribution round #5 will happen on May 10th, 09:43 PM! Mark those calendars!

[CryptKeeper]

The 4th round of distribution is complete.

Total 22,834.307841319 GB distributed, new available supply is 160,276.688294257 GB.

43,654.114908786 GBB distributed to the linked addresses.
4,551.392375023 GBB transferred to the community fund.

The 5th round is scheduled for the full moon of May (May 10, 2017 at 21:42 UTC), the rules stay the same:

BTC to bytes: 1 BTC of proven balance gives you 62.5 MB (0.0625 GB)
BTC to blackbytes: 1 BTC of proven balance gives you 2.1111 * 62.5 million blackbytes (money supply of blackbytes is 2.1111 times more than that of bytes)
Bytes to bytes: 1 byte on any Byteball address gives you 0.1 new bytes
Bytes to blackbytes: 1 byte on linked Byteball address gives you 0.21111 blackbytes

Get ready for the 5th round when Byteball will be even better than now!

[CryptKeeper]

Find one of 5 Byteball Easter Eggs,
each worth 1 GB ($80-$100):
https://youtu.be/uWTTLfclSF0

[CryptKeeper]

Find one of 5 Byteball Easter Eggs,
each worth 1 GB ($80-$100):
https://youtu.be/uWTTLfclSF0

First Easter Egg found: https://twitter.com/CryptKeeperBTT/stat ... 0013215745

[CryptKeeper]

Find one of 5 Byteball Easter Eggs,
each worth 1 GB ($80-$100):
https://youtu.be/uWTTLfclSF0

https://twitter.com/cryptkeeperbtt/stat ... 2877225984