I am a byteball investor and while I think the tech is very interesting I also have a few doubts.
Firstly in the distribution I see a danger that faith in this project could start to evaporate. By tinkering endlessly with the distribution this causes uncertainty for investors. Investors don't like uncertainty. Compared to say bitcoin in which new coins enter circulation at a predetermined rate. Here it just depends on the whim and fancy of the dev when he decides to do an air-drop. No offence Tony. But the initial promise was to distribute every full moon until 98% are in circulation. This has obviously not been kept which makes one wonder what else can be trusted.
To my knowledge no promises were ever made.
I like very much that airdrops are slowing down, the amount of bytes and blackbytes to distribute from the created supply is LIMITED, only 400.000 GB and equivalent GBB to go.
When all is distributed, who will pay the bills?
A coin needs continuous development and marketing.
Paying these things from donations is not a business model.
You need a piece of the created coins to pay for this so that all coinholders pay their part of the bill.
So either you continue to inflate the supply and let a piece of it go to pay for the bills, as Dash does, or you continue to slow down the spending of the limited supply.
The latter is our only realistic option.
This means also that much wiser spending needs to develop over time, as the percentage of coins spend on the project, compared to it's value, goes down, already a big problem.
So they must be spend ever more effectively so that continued growth in users is there.
The airdrop program is bringing in less and less new users for the coins spend, Tony made the right decision to continue to phase it out.
First off thanks for replying to my questions. I hope you don't think I'm having a dig at byteball, there are lots of things I really like about it, which is why I have invested in it. The fact that I have a few doubts that I wish to talk about, shouldn't detract from the numerous good points about byteball.
Perhaps a monthly airdrop wasn't promised, however I did get that impression from the website. Anyway I think my point still stands, just as the number of bytes is limited, so it is with bitcoin too, limited to 21 million bitcoin. Whereas in bitcoin coins are minted (which you could think of as air-dropped in small quantities to miners over a long timescale), it is predetermined by the software. However in byteball the coins were all pre-mined and you now depend on the whim of Tony how they enter circulation. The original plan has changed and might change again. What is to stop Tony deciding he wants to keep 20% instead of 2%? There might be good reasons for that, to fund development or some other reason. The point is about the uncertainty of it, not what is the right or wrong strategy. I don't think anyone would disagree attracting new users is a good aim. If slowing down the supply and using the 'treasury' of remaining bytes held by the developer to fund development is the aim, maybe the plan should be laid out and stuck to?
The issue of how development will be funded is a big problem for many projects and byteball too. I am a big fan of Dash and like the approach it has taken of a treasury and proposals with voting to decide how it is spent. With Dash it is clearly and unambiguously handled by the software. But anyway I realise this is a very different project than Dash. Byteball has this uncertainty holding it back though, I think.
My other reservation is my more serious concern which is in terms of the witnesses. As I understand it witnesses of which there are only 12 in all, are owned by Tony and will collect majority of the fees for the whole network. Obviously Tony will not be trusted to run all the witnesses for ever. How does one become a witness? As a thought experiment imagine if byteball becomes a huge success displacing bitcoin and becoming a real global payments system. Who will be the witnesses gathering all that phenomenal amount of fees? Will there still be only 12? Will users be happy that all their fees are centralised to so few witnesses?
Perhaps someone can put to rest some of my doubts. Thanks
What people often forget to mention is that POW coins always lead to only a few miners able to collude together to have 51% of the mining power. Simply because processing work is done more effectively on larger scale. In Bitcoin for example I bet 3 people rule over more than 51% of hashing power and could double spend if they collude.
In Byteball over time these witnesses will be 12 different people and so 7 need to collude together to have 51% of confirmation power and double spend, that is double to tripple as much bad actors needed and so double or tripple as decentralised.
Right now if Tony dies the project is over and out, so witnesses can still be centralised in Tony, as the project is still fully dependent on him anyway. Over time though it is indeed important that more people take on leadership roles so that the project can go on without him if necessary, and indeed witnesses become more decentralised as well.
Check out recent interview with CryptKeeper for interesting details on what power of witnesses exactly is:
https://techburst.io/byteball-interview-part-1-crypto-of-the-3rd-generation-witnesses-iota-vs-byteball-900b629bffI think a large part of my fears on this are due to me not understanding witnesses in enough detail. The problems of POW you mention are real, it is true but I would class as separate to my concerns about witnesses.
I looked at the link you sent and it is very interesting but doesn't mention fees as pertaining to witnesses, only that they serialise the transactions. I still worry that witnesses might potentially one day be rewarded too much. More research needed by me.
But also the number of witnesses, 12, is a very small number. For 7 to collude is not far fetched at all. I take your point about POW centralisation of mining. But that is deflecting attention to the problem in this network by pointing at another network.
Perhaps by some more debate on these points I can understand better. I would like to know more about the witnesses if there is some good info I can digest, I'd appreciate. Thanks again.
else you gonna miss some of your profitd 
