i had a question regarding the decentralised nature of byteball. It seems that the smart contracts are just bots using some special features making them very centralised. Any comments or feedback would be great.
What do you mean? Smart contracts can be used by anyone. You probably mean the oracles? Like the time oracle, which is a node that posts timestamps. Its true there is only one at the moment. But anyone could create one and utilize it. Or even a bunch of them and creat a smart contract which uses 5 oracles as a source.
I am yet to find the protocols for a smart contract / smart contract code, is there a documentation explaining how to code a smart contract on byteball?
The white paper
https://byteball.org/Byteball.pdf, section 21.
This particular bot doesn't use smart contracts. There is another one
https://github.com/byteball/conditional-token-sale that sells tokens based on smart contracts, but for ICOs, they are not really required. There is no problem that a smart contract would solve when you still have to trust the team that they will build what they promise to build.
Thanks for the response.
I am not that interested in trusting the people doing the ICO's as much as i am in the bots and how they function within the system.
Hmm, whats your definition of decentralised and "smart contract"? In my opinion it is very much decentralised in my example.
#freebe is a bot i wrote myself. i am not connected with the byteball developers in any way.
I create smart contracts between freebe and its users. for example to give a certain amount of bytes for blackbytes.
If freebe or the user wants to cash out this smart address (contract) the conditions are checked by the byteball network, not by the user it self or by freebe.
If the network nodes agree that a cerain condition of the contract is met, the user or me can pay out the contract.
I appreciate your feedback. I understand what you mean, though therein lies the problem. You are hosting this bot on a server. As far as the concept of decentralization goes, your bot is sitting in a central server, open to corruption, spam, being blocked, hacks, modification etc.
The standard method is to have the smart contract run directly on the chain without external bots or participants.