Important announcement.
1. I've significantly underestimated the amount of time and work required to build a large enough community around Byteball. Also, there is development work to be done that's unlikely to be completed and properly tested before the originally planned launch date in early November. That's why I'm pushing back the launch date to Christmas. The snapshot will be taken on the first Bitcoin block timestamped on or after December 25, 2016 00:00:00 UTC (Christmas block). I’ll begin to send out bytes in the afternoon of Dec 25, unless there are major reorgs on the Bitcoin network.
2. I stay true to my original intention to distribute 98% for free, but find it useful to split the distribution into several pieces. On December 25, we’ll distribute only 10%. A month later, we’ll make a new snapshot and distribute another 20%. Two months later, the next 30%. Three months later, the remaining 38%. The exact numbers may me adjusted depending on the results of previous rounds and the progress of the address linking campaign.
The reason I chose to split the distribution into several rounds is that it gives more people an opportunity to participate. It is impossible to reach every Bitcoin holder before livenet is launched. We’ll make news by distributing the first 10%, the network will become fully functional, hopefully we’ll get listed on exchanges, all that will help many more people notice Byteball. Each subsequent distribution round will have similar effect.
In each distribution round, we take a new snapshot. Exactly as previously advertised, the amount of bytes you receive in the 1st round will be proportional to the BTC balances that you show on the linked Bitcoin addresses in the Christmas block.
The 2nd and subsequent rounds are slightly different. You show both your BTC balances (as before) and your balance in bytes. You have a sort of basket that consists of a mixture of BTC and bytes. To determine the weight of the basket, every 62.5 MB are counted as 1 BTC. For example, if you have 125 MB and 3 BTC, the weight is 2+3=5 BTC. The distribution of new bytes on the 2nd and subsequent stages is proportional to the weight of your basket.
The ratio 62.5 MB per 1 BTC is chosen so that the total money supply of bytes (10
15) and the total number of BTC in circulation (16,000,000) are equivalent.
Earlier adopters have the opportunity to participate in greater number of distribution rounds and receive new bytes in each round by using the same BTC balance and bytes received in previous rounds. You are effectively doubling your stake in each additional round you take part in.
3. The linking phase (when you link your Byteball and Bitcoin addresses) of the 1st round will start in early December or late November.
4. We’ll run more active marketing in the coming months to grow our community before the 1st distribution round.
5. We doubled our development team: my colleague
https://github.com/kakysha (not a real photo) is already helping me improve the wallet.
6. We’ll run a test flight of the distribution in November. You will be able to link your Bitcoin testnet address to your Byteball testnet address, and the distribution will be proportional to your BTC testnet balance.
https://twitter.com/ByteballOrg/status/787248332469112836