Perhaps there is one more point I can drive home about Byteballs design. It took me a while to see it and it is actually very fundamental. It is a point about Bitcoins relation to its mining pools: Bitcoin is as centralized as the central organizing/coordinating device of a mining pool.
Saying Byteball is centralized because of the witnesses is a doubtfull argument because:
A Bitcoin mining pool with 51% is the chain. Thats why they need to have several for decentralisation and it is mere social agreement that 51% is "Bad", but it certainly is centralisation. A (block)chain/line is the simplest geometry to represent TIME!
A witness shows direction of the DAG (directed Acyclo "meaning not ring/round" Graph) and therefore prevents cyclical states in the graph (No time/No Progression). So do the other witnesses and inform each other that they told some of the Byteball Bytes what time it is (by posting "units"/please refer to whitepaper for technical). Knowing time prevents the double spend. It also makes transactions fast fast fast.
In a sense you do everything yourself. No pool no nothing. But your witness tells you WHEN! you did it. So you know about NOW! Thats consensus.
Its fundamental. Its stupidly simple. Yet all Blockchains basically are a stupid linear clocks that hashes like crazy to prove you have done work and say what happend last. Because thats also how you distribute the Bitcoins and call it reward. And all you can do is walk a line and be in a chain. Thats why I call POW coins prisioners of work.
Byteballs 12 witness (the number is arbitrary and could be changed up or down within some limits) only sounds centralized. Perhaps it is not all arbitrary because we used 12 to tell time for a good portion of history. Would you really need even 12 Bitcoin Pools???
In the current state of Bitcoin you could almost stop the network by strategically taking out the mining pool coordinators of the biggest pool one after the other. In a sense Bitcoingold with its difficulty re-adjustment every block is no mear snake oil and may very well be way ahead of bitcoin ("Classic") if certain anti pool cenarios come to pass.... Likelyhood almost 0 unless someone wants to see crypto burn and goes after the pools.
I mined in a pool with a hd5830 when it still made sense and I already did point out how the Bitcoin Eco system did progress down to ASIC clusters mining lords that meet to agree and disagree on protocol changes (Segwit etc.) or forks.
For me bitcoin always was "the protocol". The mining pools were a way to contribute and recieve airdrop for the contribution. I never questioned the "why" because it was just the way it was. You have to mine and thats how you contribute and thats how you decentralise.
These 3 things:
1. decentralisation
2. distribution/Mining reward/airdrop and
3. contribution/community
where one thing.
Byteball has restructured them. Somewhat similar, somewhat radically different and somehow way more effective.
And it is by this that it is also no coincidence that the Byteball community is friendly, helpfull and not diseased with hype and buzz. A calm sense of progress is so symptomatic for Byteballs community and its organic growth. This is why so much was achieved in one year. 2018 may very well be a good year for Byteball. It takes time to be noticed by those who just have attention for the next Buzz. And why ask for attention If you can use it to grow the project?
Sorry if this implies a certain critic around the nature of this very thread
It is not intended because getting 1000 votes is a worthy goal.
Let every sock puppet have a vote. Eventually we will trade fundamentals and Byteball will get over the pain of fast deployment (that Airdrop pressed on the value hard!). After all, magick internet money will be magick internet money.
...Listens to the song of the 🐋🐋 🐋 🐋 🐋 .....