We have all heard of the Byteball airdrop by now, so I’m not going to bother nagging any more about that. Just click here if you've been living under a rock the last weeks. I do however want to hear some opinions regarding what you guys think will be the outcome from the airdrop, as well as share my own opinions on the matter.
The airdrop gave us all between $10 and $160 worth of Byteball bytes for attesting our Steem username, where 50 % was liquid, and the other 50 % is locked in a smart contract for a year. I believe this was a very good move from the Byteball team for a few reasons:
- It gave everyone a taste of what the smart contracts on the Byteball DAG can be used for. All of us now hold crypto that is locked in a smart contract, so you are kind of “forced” to learn about the smart contracts.
- It forces everyone to be invested in the success of Byteball for at least a year. If you believe that Byteball will fail, then you should sell all your Bytes right away, right? But you obviously can’t sell the ones that are locked in a smart contract for a year, so you are kind of vested in the success of Byteball. I bet all of us wants it to grow ten times over the next year, letting us cash out $100 to $1,600 each instead of what we got from the liquid half.
- It prevents everyone from dumping all their Bytes, which would lower the price/value of the coin. This is what happened in the past when Byteball airdropped to Bitcoin holders.
What exactly can we do with Byteball?
I have seen a few people wonder exactly what Byteball is, and I think it's important that we holders are aware of exactly what we are holding. In contrast to what many people believe, Byteball does not even run on a blockchain! Instead it uses a system called Directed Acylic Graph, mostly just referred to as DAG. It works a little bit differently, and the main advantages is that it can do things like produce multiple blocks at the time, giving the opportunity for better scaling. If you want to learn more about DAGs, then I suggest reading this article by Forbes.
Anyway, let's return to the point of the Byteball for a second. Right now they have some cool apps, such as sport betting, flight delay insurance, attestations, exchange bots, and even a Zork game running on the system. All these utilizes smart contracts of course.
This is obviously nothing revolutionary, but the idea behind it is to have human readable smart contracts where a huge amount of bots and systems like the ones mentioned above can run. Just like most other blockchains, its future is dependent on dapps being created for it.
Will you be involved with Byteball?
I believe that my point #2 might be the most interesting one, where it “forces” everyone to be long-term investors of Byteball Bytes. This leads to the question; how many people will be involved in the future of Byteball?
I’m not a developer myself, so I often have very little to contribute with when it comes to blockchains and cryptos. However, like here on the Steem blockchain, there’s stuff we can do to promote Byteball, such as telling other people about it, answering people who need help on places like the byteball subreddit, or just get involved with the community. Being a member of a crypto community might not feel like a direct way of helping, but I’m sure the communities actually contribute indirectly with increasing the value of a cryptocoin.
What I want to know with this post is if anyone here plan on getting involved with the Byteball community, either as a developer, or as a community member? I want to get a feel of whether or not people just want to get their free money, or if the airdrop actually has successfully gotten people involved with the project.