Great videos! Hope they help some new people discover Obyte.

Why isn't it mentioned anywhere in L2 comparisons? Why is nobody in DeFi building on it? Or are they but not talking about it?

Strange project. Consensys, Microsoft, Liquid, NEO, yet 0 recent information besides some attempt to P&D it.

If you want to achieve anything start talking about the project on socials or start building something on top of Obyte, like PolloPollo.org, and start talking about that. Word of mouth is the most powerful marketing tool there is. Don't expect the team to do it for you. They've built the most feature complete platform in all of crypto, yet no-one is talking about it and hardly anyone is building anything on it.

Great initiative, I'll try to come up with something clever

If you rather want a web frontend you can use this one: https://bb-odds.herokuapp.com/

That kind of thinking is what makes you miss all the important innovations in any field. You don't even know what you're talking about but you start throwing insults around straight away. Pretty damn sad.

The protocol design decides what is right or wrong, it states that witnesses must be public figures or organizations with a real word reputation at stake. Otherwise the consensus mechanism is not secure. It's not a matter of right or wrong, it's a matter of design. If you don't like this principle I suggest you find another project because it is not going to change, it's fundamental to the design. Nothing to do with arrogance.

Numerous times people in this thread, including me, have tried to explain to you that a state attack on a witness doesn't mean the network stops working. I can't help it that you don't want to understand how witnesses work and what they can and can not do.

Not all people / users have to care, it would be preferable but if they don't: at least hub operators and other witnesses should care. If they do the system will work almost just as well. If nobody cares then the design will fail.

The number of witnesses is not limited, anybody can become one.
They already operate over TOR, it is a requirement to not reveal their IP to the world.
Random selection of (and access to) witnesses defeats the purpose, you still don't understand why they can't be anonymous and what they actually do to secure the network.

He was anonymous, the network can't be secured by anonymous witnesses. Plus he tried to persuade people with cashback, that's also not the idea behind being a witness. People should trust them because of their reputation not because they promise to give you a tiny amount of tx fees back (basically bribe). I'm sure Bytefan was just trying to help but he did it in the wrong way. Now he wants to sell the source code for Byteball.fr for 100GB. It was an extremely useful resource so we are debating whether we should rebuild it ourselves or buy it from him. We can't help it that he didn't quite understand the idea behind the consensus mechanism. I'm sad that he left because we could definitely have used his skills.

Rogier is not some kind of buffoon, he's a Byteball volunteer since the early days as well. He introduced many people to Byteball and is also a mod in the Byteball Telegram. He actively works on BTC acceptance in the real world and when he has the time will also integrate Bytes in his crypto payment processor software that is used by hundreds of merchants and web shops throughout Europe. I assume you didn't read the article or watched the interview. He's an excellent candidate.

Bitcointalk is not really the best place to discuss ideas. For the longest time there was no team and Tony basically had to do everything by himself. He didn't have time for community management, he was working 18 hours a day on the platform. Anyone could and still can become a contributor through github. Only a few people did. Byteball didn't have ICO funds to work with to hire a team so it had to completely depend on volunteers. Of which I was one myself. I recently joined the team though, since we do have some funds now. We discuss most things on our Slack (https://slack.byteball.org/), which is also free for anyone to join.

The biggest problem is that people just sit and wait for their coins to magically increase in value and let other people do all the work. It doesn't work like that. No community management? Volunteer to do community management, et voila, now it's there.

What does price have to do with it? If anything it should be even more interesting to invest in it now?

What's the point of these endless complain posts? It's starting to feel like a childish personal vendetta.

What makes Byteball unique is that it allows regular people (without coding knowledge) to easily create secure smart contracts. That's something very valuable that no other project has. Whether regular people actually need smart contracts in their everyday lives remains to be seen. As long as Byteball is hardly known by anyone and too few people are experimenting with it we will never know.

Pretty straightforward what you could be doing instead of complaining, right?

This is the exact opposite of what Byteball is trying to achieve. Hashgraph is licensed, patented, federated, has centralized power, etc. While they will probably achieve a lot because it is much closer to the models big corporates are used to it is by no means a better model (for end users) than Byteball.

In what way do we need to trust a witness? A witness just sends transactions which (by definition of the protocol) cannot be fake or wrong or invalid in any way. And these witness txs are simply our way of attaining consensus on which transactions are final.

With Bitcoin, you don't really have to trust miners: if there are conflicting txs pending, then it doesn't matter which one they confirm. Whichever one they  choose to put in their block becomes final. The only risk is with enough hashing power they could roll back and restart mining from an earlier block, thus changing recent history in a way.

Likewise, you really don't have to trust witnesses with Byteball: if there are conflicting txs pending, then it doesn't matter which one they choose. Whatever they choose to append their tx to becomes final. And the roll back risk does not even exist here.

So, Byteball is even MORE trustless than Bitcoin.

All users in the Byteball network follow the same rules, they are all equal, but to be able to resolve doublespends you need some order in the transactions, witnesses provide this order. They follow the same rules as everybody else. The difference is that you know who they are so you can kick them out if they misbehave. This gives YOU the power and not the witness. You can't do that with miners.

There is no difference between one witness and another in any kind of practical way so it doesn't matter that you can't choose them freely, they're all the same. They don't *do* anything, they *witness*. The only reason to replace one is because you think some candidate has more to lose in the real world so their bond is stronger and they have even less reason to misbehave than another one. "A" witness doesn't matter, it's about all 12, so no you never trust a single witness and you don't have to. I'm afraid you just don't understand how the mechanism works and what a witness can and can not do, even though we've been trying to explain it you. Instead of asking more questions you jump to conclusions that are just plain wrong.

We could also have 100 or 1000 witnesses but the platform will become less secure if you have more witnesses. A single witness has no power at all and can easily be replaced by users. Users have the real power in the Byteball network, not witnesses. Only when 6 or more witnesses collude they can harm the network, but they still can't change anything in the past. In fact they have very limited options for abuse.

Thousands are not needed, we need enough to replace a compromised witness, or somebody / a business who wants to quit being one. A few dozen would be sufficient.
Fiat also has a growing market for weapons, drugs, etc. We'll have to find out how law enforcement treats "witnesses", they don't actually do anything that breaks the law you know.

What is the single point of failure then? There is none. In fact, I would argue that Byteball  is more decentralized by design than Bitcoin or Ethereum. When we have a lot more than 12 different witnesses to choose from it will also be more decentralized in practice.

You didn't read the story I guess. We don't appoint witnesses, it's up to you to pick them. Rogier is the first candidate, more will follow. The Byteball network belongs to the users, they decide who they want to be their witnesses. In the startup phase Tony had to run all 12 because we didn't have any candidates yet. So this is a big deal, it's step 1 in the community taking ownership over the platform, also known as decentralization. I could post here how you can change your witness list but blindly changing it without checking out the candidate is worse than leaving the switch on auto-update from hub. So I suggest you read the article and make an informed decision yourself.

KYC is not just a gimmick, user controlled identity can also be used instead of passwords for instance. Many use cases for this.
We're not ignoring the criticism on the name, we're actively addressing it.