What is Byteball?
Byteball is a decentralized system that provides tamper-proof storage of data, which includes currencies, property titles, debt, shares, and more. Byteball's slogan is: “Smart payments made simple.” Byteball is one of only a few cryptocurrency platforms that isn't built on a blockchain.
How Does Byteball Work?
Byteball doesn’t have a blockchain nor blocks. Transactions are their own blocks and don’t have to connect in a straight chain; They’re linked to multiple previous transactions and form a structure called a DAG.
If two transactions try to spend the same output (double-spend) and there is no partial order between them, both are allowed into the database but only the one that comes earlier in the total order is deemed valid. Total order is established by selecting a single chain on the DAG (the main chain) that is attracted to units signed by known users called witnesses. A unit whose hash is included earlier on the main chain is deemed earlier on the total order.
Users choose the witnesses by naming the user-trusted witnesses in every storage unit. Witnesses are reputable users with real-world identities, and users who name them expect them to never try to double-spend . As long as the majority of witnesses behave as expected, all double-spend attempts are detected in time and marked as such. As witnesses-authored units accumulate after a user’s unit, there are deterministic (not probabilistic) criteria when the total order of the user’s unit is considered final.
Users store their funds on addresses that may require more than one signature to spend (multisig). Spending may also require other conditions to be met, including conditions that are evaluated by looking for specific data posted to the database by other users (oracles). Users can issue new assets and define rules that govern their transferability.