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.
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-900b629bff