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For full technical description, read the whitepaper: https://obyte.org/Byteball.pdfFormer name: Obyte (ex. Byteball)Exchanges: Bittrex, Cryptox, Bit-Z, Stealthex - look for additional exchanges on the main page of the siteIf you are trading large blocks and don't want to move the price, trade P2P via smart contract (without human escrow)Prediction markets (sports betting, binary options): find a peer on our discord https://discord.gg/qHHST4eInsurance: find a peer on our discord https://discord.gg/qHHST4eExplorer: https://explorer.obyte.orgDownload the wallet: iOS Android Mac Windows Linux or build from source at github Desktop wallets can be full nodes (will take a while syncing with the network after the first start) or light nodes. Mobile wallets are always light clients.If you want to experience the wallet without paying a penny, visit https://obyte.org/testnet.html to install testnet wallet and click the link to receive free bytes to play with. The link will open your wallet: The designThere are no blocks in Obyte, and no block size issue. Instead, every new transaction references one or more earlier ones (parents) by including and signing their hashes. The links among transactions form a DAG (directed acyclic graph😞By including its parents, each new transaction also indirectly includes and confirms all parents of the parents, parents of the parents of the parents, and so on. As more transactions are added after your transaction, the number of confirmations you receive grows like snowball, that’s why the original name of the platform Byteball (our snowflakes are bytes of data).ConsensusThere is no PoW, no PoS, and no mining. Instead, we have the DAG, which already establishes partial order between transactions, plus we add the main chain within the DAG:The main chain (MC) allows to define total order between transactions: the transaction which gets included (directly or indirectly) earlier on the MC, is deemed earlier in the total order. When there is a double-spend, the version of the transaction that comes earlier in the total order is deemed valid, all others are deemed void.The main chain is defined deterministically based on the positions of transactions in the graph. Refer to the white paper for details, but as a general rule, the MC gravitates towards transactions authored by well known users, which we call witnesses. The list of witnesses is defined by users themselves as they include the list in every transaction they post. The MC then follows the path within the DAG such that:1. the witness lists of the neighboring transactions on the chain are either identical or differ by only one mutation,2. the chain goes through the most number of witness-authored transactions, compared with alternative chains.The above is very brief and sketchy description with many important details omitted, refer to the white paper for a full technical story.Fees and intrinsic valueThe fees paid for storing one’s transactions (or any other data) in the Obyte database are equal to the size of the data being stored. If the size of your transaction data is 500 bytes, you pay exactly 500 bytes (the native currency of Obyte) in fees. This means there is intrinsic value in bytes: it is the utility of permanently storing that size of data in a decentralized immutable database. For data that represents financial transactions, the value is social rather than personal, because you absolutely need to store the full coin history in order to be able to prove the value and authenticity of the coin to each subsequent owner.The fees are collected partially by those who are first to reference your transaction as parent and partially by witnesses. The former incentivizes referencing the most recent transactions as parents, which results in the DAG growing in one direction only, like the trunk of a tree, and being as narrow as network latency permits. If new transactions are rare enough, such that all nodes have enough time to sync before a new transaction appears, the DAG will look almost like a chain, with only occasional forks and quick merges.Money supplyThe total number of bytes is 1015, all bytes were issued in the genesis transaction. Since the fees paid are returned into the circulation, the money supply will remain the same.Exchanges list the currency as gigabytes (GB, GBYTE), 1 gigabyte is 1 billion bytes. The total money supply in gigabytes is 1,000,000.Deterministic finalityIn Obyte, there is a protocol rule that a transaction must include the previous transaction (if any) sent from the same address, i.e. there must be partial order between subsequent transactions from the same address. Breaking this rule is considered equivalent to double-spending, therefore at least one of such unordered transactions will become void. If we assume that most witnesses follow this rule (that’s what they are elected for), they have to reference only sufficiently recent transactions as parents and can’t inherit from old enough parents. Therefore, they can no longer influence the MC (which is attracted to witnesses) in the old enough part of the DAG, and that part of the MC becomes stable, hence the total order relative to this MC also becomes stable. See the white paper for discussion of exact criteria of reaching stability, here it is important that the criteria are deterministic, and once a transaction appears on the stable part of the MC, it is final, and, unlike all other cryptocurrencies, no re-orgs are possible. This is extremely important for applications in financial industry and for wider adoption in general, as most people are used to expect certainty in matters of money and property ownership, and the concept of probabilistic finality is a difficult sell.Assets and on-chain exchangeBytes is the native currency of Obyte. Users can issue any other tokens (assets), e.g. to represent debt. The debt can be expressed e.g. in fiat currencies or in natural units (barrels, ounces, kWh, etc). The issuers of the debt can reveal their real-world identities and/or be voluntarily attested (i.e. their real-word identities be verified by a well known third party such as CA). This enables the use of the existing legal system to secure against fraud.The issued assets can be used as means of payment, along with bytes. Assets can be exchanged against bytes and other assets by both parties signing a single unit that executes both legs of the exchange, thus the two transactions either happen simultaneously or don't happen at all. This kind of signing is called multilateral signing. No centralized exchange is needed, hence no trust is necessary and no exchange fees (apart from the usual fees for the size of the data).Private untraceable paymentsAssets can be either public or private. All transactions in public assets are visible to everyone on the public decentralized database, just like Bitcoin. Bytes is a predefined public asset.Payments in private assets are not published to the public database. Instead, only the hash of the transaction is stored to the database, while the plaintext of the transaction is sent directly from the payer to the payee. To protect against double-spends, a spend proof is also published to the Obyte database. The spend proof is constructed as a hash of the output being spent, so that if the same output is spent twice, the spend proofs will be necessarily the same.I’ve already described this design at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1574508.0, see more details in the white paper.Regulated assetsRegulated institutions can issue assets that are compatible with KYC/AML requirements. Every transfer of such asset is to be cosigned by the issuer, and if there is anything that contradicts the regulations, the issuer won't cosign.This way, banks can issue fiat-pegged assets and stay fully compliant. They can open demand deposit accounts and track them on Obyte as assets. These assets are easily exchangeable against bytes and other assets (with bank’s approval).Other features- Spending conditions (AKA smart contracts) in an easy to understand declarative language https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1617816.0- Multisig: a special case of spending conditions- On-chain oracles can post data (such as timestamps, exchange rates, weather, various events) directly to the database, then that data can be referenced from spending conditions- Private end-to-end encrypted messaging: used to convey private payment data, communicate in multisig scenarios, and chat with a merchant’s bot.- Attestation of real name, which is important for applications that require real-world identity, e.g. ICOs that require KYC.Initial distributionThere will be no ICO, no crowdsale. I believe the success of a currency depends on the number of people who own it, in fact Peter R’s research suggests that historical marketcap of Bitcoin follows Metcalfe's law: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=572106.0, i.e. it is proportional to the square of the number of active users. That’s why I want Bytes to be in the hands of as many people as possible: 98% of all bytes and blackbytes (the private untraceable currency) are to be distributed for free. 1% I reserve for myself Free distributionWe currently use 4 methods of free distribution, see https://obyte.org/#dist.How you can help play with the wallets, install them on multiple devices, pair them for multisig. If you find bugs, report them. run a relay on your cloud server to help the network. The relay doesn’t hold any private keys, so you don’t have to worry too much about security. Get relay source code from https://github.com/byteball/obyte-relay run a hub to better decentralize the delivery of private payments (the hub also includes a relay). Again, the security doesn’t matter much as all messages are end-to-end encrypted. Hub address can be changed by users in their wallet settings. Get hub source code from https://github.com/byteball/obyte-hub. Alternative hubs already running: byteball.fr/bb, byteroll.com/bb, byteball-ua.net/bb, byteball.me/bb, blackbytes.me/bb. Hubs and full wallets on the world map: https://stats.obyte.org/worldmap.php fix bugs, contribute improvements in our github repositories https://github.com/byteball. In particular, we need faster syncing and faster UI. Before now, I prioritized simplicity of algorithms over performance, now we need speed too. A 10x improvement should come easy enough, the next 10x will be probably harder. Discuss any major changes before actually implementing them. develop new tools/apps that you think will be useful for Obyte users spread the word about Obyte and remember that its value is proportional to the square of the number of active users Community fundWe have a community fund for financing bounties and other useful work. More information about the fund: https://wiki.obyte.org/byteball-community-fund. Donation addresses: KREOV5Y57FRWQKDHJ7BD3SFQBEVVPAG3 (for bytes) and 39zeGpu4nG6BqB9ARxd9xM9XThX9JCmx8t (for BTC).Twitter: https://twitter.com/ObyteOrgDiscord: https://discord.gg/qHHST4eMedium: https://medium.com/obyteWiki: https://wiki.obyte.orgTelegram: https://telegram.me/obyteorgRussian Telegram: https://telegram.me/obyte_ru

Harmony and The Sandbox Partner to Enable Growth of Blockchain Gaming And the role of the NFT in DeFi and what Harmony is doing to be part of that revolution In this post: The details of the Harmony + The Sandbox Partnership 👉 tl;dr: What the partnership entails and what the community can expect in the future. NFT’s, DeFi, Applications, and Harmony 👉 tl;dr: Technology adoption always starts out looking like a game. In other words, NFT’s, while having clear application in blockchain gaming, have a much broader design space and touches many areas of finance, including DeFi and CrossFi. If you’re a developer interested in building an application on a fast, scalable Proof-of-Stake blockchain with ultra low gas fees, 👉 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👈 We have a fund dedicated to supporting innovative small teams and developers building the next generation of apps on Harmony. Be ONE of them! Harmony + The Sandbox We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership with one of blockchain gaming industry’s leading projects, The Sandbox. At Harmony, we believe in empowering gamers through true digital ownership of their game assets and creating new economic incentives through play-to-earn business model. We want to support and facilitate The Sandbox’s team mission to offering a gaming virtual world where players can play, create, own, trade, govern and monetize their gaming experience through the use of blockchain technology, NFTs and their native utility token $SAND powering their platform. Harmony intends to become one of the first Proof-of-Stake layer 1 blockchain that will enable high-speed trading of NFTs among its community, and commits to supporting the growth and audience development of blockchain gaming by building bridges between Harmony and Ethereum — supporting NFT standards such as ERC-721 and ERC-1155 on Harmony. The Sandbox is one of the 3 main contributors to the ERC-1155 standard together with Enjin and Horizon Games. A key feature of The Sandbox decentralized gaming platform is the ability for anyone to make his own NFTs with VoxEdit. . . These NFTs can then be utilized within The Sandbox’s game maker, but also by other dApps, platforms and now blockchains as well! I’m thrilled to see major blockchain actors such as Harmony and their tech team work onto enabling true interoperability of the NFTs by bridging them in and out of Ethereum. This is a major step forward towards increasing the utility (thus potentially value) of the NFTs and their liquidity into other chains. — Sebastien Borget, COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox By doing so, assets, computation, and ownership in The Sandbox might be experienced on Harmony in the future, taking advantage of our fast scalable infrastructure, 5 second finality, and robust Proof-of-Stake sharded network. This partnership with The Sandbox will further enable Harmony to support future game developers who need low-cost, high-throughput consensus platform to power their blockchain based games. And by engaging with and supporting The Sandbox, we have an opportunity to understand the problems that game developers face so that we can better design Harmony to suit their needs. NFTs are important to Harmony’s roadmap because we believe that user-generated, community-driven gaming experiences is one area that will drive large-scale adoption of blockchain. The Sandbox is Harmony’s first project because Sandbox is a leader in the blockchain gaming industry with a strong product and community. — Stephen Tse, Harmony CEO and Founder This partnership will enable us to learn from an industry leader so that we can be ready to power games that The Sandbox and others develop in the future. By working with The Sandbox, we will be well positioned to capture the opportunities that blockchain gaming presents for scalable protocols like Harmony. If you’re a game developer interested in building a game on a fast, scalable Proof-of-Stake blockchain with ultra low gas fees, 👉 GET IN TOUCH WITH US 👈 We have a fund dedicated to supporting innovative small teams and developers building the next generation of apps on Harmony. Be one of them! NFT’s, DeFi, Applications, and Harmony It’s been said that technological adoption always starts out looking like a game. This is the case with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT). The initial application of NFTs will be within gaming, but their applications are much broader and touches many, many areas, especially in finance. NFTs are special tokens with unique highly individual properties that sets each one apart from each other. So far, many items have been tokenized as NFTs. Below is a short survey of which domains have utilized NFTs: Art and Collectibles Because art is unique, it makes it a perfect object to tokenize into an NFT. Indeed, just last month, Paris Hilton sold a piece of art for charity. Gaming In The Sandbox, items in the metaverse are NFTs, meaning they are unique and there’s no other thing like it. Other games have NFTs also, such as decentraland, which also sells unique pieces of land and these NFTs can also be bought and sold on marketplaces. Insurance Because NFTs have super unique properties, you can encode a set of parameters like the object that is insured, for how much, and the conditions by which the insurance coverage is exercised. Domain Names One key aspect of all NFTs is ownership. So, for a given property, like a domain name, you can encode the owner and have it be cryptographically verified. Options and Futures Contracts Like most contracts, it has a set of hyper-unique properties. So NFTs make for a perfect vehicle to represent Options and Futures contracts in finance. NFT and DeFi Now imagine a combination of the items above and adding to it the element of basic traditional finance such as buying and lending. For example, one could take Paris Hilton’s piece of art, deposit it into a smart contract and collateralize it and borrow ONE tokens against it. You can only imagine the numerous permutations where NFTs can be utilized. We are literally still at the very beginning of this technological revolution, where we will see many areas of traditional banking and finance disrupted. We are excited for what the future holds and Harmony is now building the right foundation to take advantage of what that future holds. Become ONE with Harmony Developers can build on Harmony today, a fast and open blockchain for decentralized applications, suited to handle DeFi and cross-border finance. Harmony Mainnet supports state sharding with instant finality. Our staking mechanism reduces centralization while supporting delegation and slashing. We ❤️ Developers. Telegram | Twitter | Discord | Youtube | Medium | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Instagram WRITTEN BY Peter Abilla Hardest worker in the room and a constant work in progress. Harmony Protocol $ONE. University of Chicago, BYU.