Overview

Byteball, listed on Coinmarketcap as Byteball Bytes, is a DAG-based cryptocurrency developed by Anton Churyumov.

Smart/conditional payments
The killer feature is the Smart/Conditional Payment. You set a condition for how the payee receives the money. If the condition is not met, you get your money back. This substitutes for trust between strangers because neither is able to scam the other.

This smart-contract feature has many real-world peer-to-peer applications, including:


 * no-fee crypto exchanges
 * sports betting
 * selling or buying insurance concerning negative events like a flight delay.

Textcoin
One can send Bytes (Byteball funds) by email or WhatsApp etc, even if the recipient is not in Byteball yet. For email, the sender just writes an email address where he would normally write a Byteball address. When he hits "Send", his email app is opened with pre-filled text for the recipient. The sender can edit it before sending. The recipient receives an email with a link. Example:

"Here is your link to receive 0.001 GB: https://byteball.org/openapp.html#textcoin?pact-volume-lazy-midnight-mix-cool-fiction-symbol-tag-fiction-coral-sibling"

Identity verification for cryptos
Starting 18 January, every Byteball user can link his Byteball address to his real world identity. The user’s personal data is verified by Jumio, the leading provider of identity verification services, and stored in the user’s Byteball wallet. At the same time, a hash of the personal data is stored on the public DAG and signed by a trusted attestor. The attestor also serves as a witness, so it is already trusted.

This attestation allows the user to prove to anybody that his Byteball address is linked to a verified person, without disclosing any personal information. It also allows to reveal the private information to individual service providers on demand, and the service provider can easily verify authenticity of this information using the hash stored on the public DAG.

Blackbytes
Private payments can be made using blackbytes, a cash-like untraceable currency. Its transactions are not visible on the public database that shows all payments made with (white)bytes. Blackbytes are sent peer-to-peer instead in an encrypted chat session.

Chatbots
Chatbots are fun and facilitate real-world transactions, including shopping with a merchant and paying with two clicks. Current chatbots are: Real name attestation bot, Flight delay insurance, Transition bot, Byte-BTC exchange, Flight delays oracle, Sports oracle, BTC oracle, Rosie bot, Byteball Asset Manager, Zork | game, Poll bot, Blackbytes Exchange BEEB (Trustful^), Blackbyte Exchange [freebe] (Semi-trustless^), Buy blackbytes (trustless), Slice&Dice MUD, Betting bot (Semi-trustless), Luckybytes Lottery (provably fair), TitanCoin ICO, Byteball-Altcoin Exchange Bot, Fun-coins faucet, SilentNotary ICO.

^Note that in the cryptosphere, "trustless" is generally preferable to "trustful" -- the reverse of what one might expect. And neither word equates to "trusted" or "untrusted".

Platform
Byteball has its native currencies, Bytes and Blackbytes. It is also a platform for new assets (coins/tokens) you can create yourself at minimal cost in five minutes. You can simply send your asset to anyone with a Byteball wallet, or you can use your asset in many smart contracts.

Some examples:
 * Fun-coins: You can get millions of Tingos, Tangos, Zingos and Zangos from the free faucet in the Bot Store. The idea is use them to practise with textcoins, smart contracts etc without worrying if you lose them somehow.
 * TitanCoin ICO: Independent ICO, where coins can be bought via the bot paying with GB, BTC, or Ethereum.
 * SilentNotary ICO: Independent ICO, where coins can be bought via the bot paying with GB, BTC, or Ethereum.

Native currencies

 * Bytes: Total supply = 10^15 bytes. Unit on exchanges is the GBYTE. 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 KB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes.
 * Blackbytes: Total supply = 2.1111 x 10^15. 1 GBB = 1,000 MBB = 1,000,000 KBB = 1,000,000,000 Blackbytes.

All Bytes and Blackbytes were created at the genesis unit. So far approx 65% have been issued for use.

Date introduced

 * First announced 5 September 2016.
 * Platform went live on 25 December 2016.

DAG
Byteball data is stored and ordered using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than a blockchain. This allows all users to secure each other's data by referencing earlier data units created by other users, and also removes scalability limits common to blockchains such as the blocksize issue.

There are no blocks: there are only transactions. You just add your transaction to the end of the DAG yourself, without waiting for the miners to (hopefully) include it in some future block.

The Byteball DAG is about 16 GB in Jan 2018.

Zurich presentation
A presentation given by Tony on 2 February 2018, that gives an excellent overview of Byteball.

Videos