You might have heard about Official Byteball Airdrop to Steemians by now and if you are little bit skeptic about cryptocurrencies that do massive airdrops to large amount of people, you might ask: "Why would I want to go through this airdrop process by downloading yet another wallet software and is there any value in something that is given away for free?"
First, little bit of information about Byteball. Byteball is not a Bitcoin clone nor Ethereum token. Byteball is very different from most of the cryptocurrencies because it's using DAG instead of blockchain and it doesn't have a Proof of Work as mining, so it needs to come up with different ways how to get the Bytes (native currency of Byteball) to large amount of people. It's not a first airdrop for Byteball either and there are various ongoing distribution methods still going on right now.
So, the main questions now are: "Why would I want yet another cryptocurrency?", "What can I do with it?" and "Should I just sell them to get more Bitcoin?".
Here are some reasons why you should keep your Bytes:
- Byteball has feature-complete wallet, which means that while there are still improvements that can be made, most of the stuff mentioned in Byteball Whitepaper is already done. Multi-device and multi-signature wallets - checked, user issued tokens for ICOs - checked, privacy with private coins and TOR support - checked, simple human-readable smart-contracts - checked, extendable bot platform - checked.
- Byteball is undervalued and most people discard it because of its price. It's because Bytes are listed on exchanges as GigaBytes (GByte), which makes the total supply ~20 smaller than Bitcoin and the price much higher than most cryptocurrencies out there. If Byteball Bytes would be listed as MegaBytes (MByte) then total supply would be ~5 times bigger than Bitcoin and the price would be under the dollar per MByte. Combination of feature-complete wallet and high price makes most cryptocurrency newcomers think that it is overvalued and it has nowhere to grow, which is quite opposite.
- Byteball is just getting started ... with mass adoption. Airdrop to Steemians is a great example of reaching large number of existing cryptocurrency users, but there are many ideas where to move next from here, which means there will be many more distribution methods to come until the distribution fund is finally depleted.
- You get your own alias for your Byteball address, so other Steemians can send you Bytes without needing to know your long Byteball address, they could just instert
steem/usernameas an address and Bytes will be sent to the address that you attested. - The most important reason - you can actually use Byteball Bytes with other people already now. Obviously, you could use the airdropped Bytes to pay fees for other attestations (like Real Name Attestation with Jumio) and acquire more Bytes with rewards, but some of those Bytes will be locked for one year. So, the real use that many of the existing Byte owners do is P2P sports betting. Sports betting with the Byteball platform is like betting with friends you trust using cash (there is no need for an intermediary to hold funds). The difference is that you can bet with anybody and you don't have to trust them to follow through on the bet because the funds are locked with a smart contract. Right at this moment, one of the biggest thing in sports betting is FIFA World Cup and you can see the odds (without installing Byteball wallet) for the next 2 soccer matches on BB Odds. Best part, if you think that these odds are ridiculous, you can become a bet maker too and provide your own odds that other Byteball users can take.
Disclaimer: BB Odds website was built by me using existing Byteball betting bot API, which was built by another Byteball community member. Same way, that Betting bot was built using another existing bot, which was built by Byteball developers. More about evolution of sports betting on Byteball can be read from Byteball blog.