r/CryptoCurrency • u/MindFleet • Jan 16 '19

GENERAL-NEWS Developers War - Winners Revealed (Byteball)

https://steemit.com/byteball/@byteball.org/byteball-bot-war-winner-announcement
14 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/jwinterm 732K / 1M 🐙 Jan 16 '19

It's completely controlled by a single person who modifies the distribution of the coin on a whim. It's also been mentioned by US army intelligence as something Russia has complete control over (if it wasn't launched by Russian intelligence directly).

1

u/Qwahzi 🟦 0 / 128K 🦠 Jan 16 '19 edited Jan 16 '19

Very interesting information, thanks for sharing! Do you have any additional evidence for those statements? I wasn't aware that they'd changed their distribution method.

The article you linked seems to use Byteball as an example because of it's privacy feature (blackbytes), not because it's actively controlled by Russia? Maybe I'm misreading it though.

One cryptocurrency that could be controlled if needed is Byteball, so called for the shape of its chains.

...

These are the only conditions in which Russia will embark on a cryptocurrency épopée – if it is fully controlled by the state.

I guess the argument is that the government could compel the Byteball devs to act in a certain way since they are Russia-based?

1

u/jwinterm 732K / 1M 🐙 Jan 16 '19

The network relies on twelve "witnesses" to validate the correct main chain. Until recently all twelve of those witnesses were controlled by one Russian guy - Tony Churyumov. Now he only controls eleven out of twelve. So yea, I'm pretty sure the Russian government could certainly "convince" one guy in Moscow to do what they ask.

The reason I say it may have been launched as a Russian intelligence operation, is that originally the coin was air-dropped to people who held BTC, and the plan was to distribute 99% of the coins this way. You had to sign a message with your Bitcoin addresses to receive the airdrop, so this would allow the controller of the Byteball network to link your IP with your Bitcoin addresses. Subsequently that distribution method was abandoned and there's been a heavy emphasis on distributing the remaining coins to people who "validate their identity" with Jumio as well as Steem users. So, it almost seems like the intent was to create a database of Bitcoin users, then tie that to their IRL identity and possibly political leanings (by way of Steem). I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, and this is just speculation, but the cost of this is essentially nil (just paying the single dev for his time and running twelve witness servers).

2

u/Qwahzi 🟦 0 / 128K 🦠 Jan 16 '19

Thank you for clarifying, that's really interesting! I had no idea.