I know you are all waiting for news about the renaming/rebranding but that requires a little more patience from you. Today I want to talk about the current distribution methods and how we can fine-tune, adjust or replace them with better ones.

What we have learned from The Byteball Draw so far is that it’s hard to keep people at both ends of the spectrum happy. Whales want more points for the balances they have, and small holders feel their chances of winning are too small. Now, obviously it’s very hard to please everyone but I think the biggest lesson from this latest release is that you want to be involved in designing the methods before we release them. So that’s what we are going to try.

But before we get to that I want to take a moment to evaluate what we have. From our point of view, your turn will come ;)

Let’s just take them one by one.

Arguably the most important distribution method at the moment because in theory it brings us guaranteed unique users. Although it’s up for debate what a user actually is. Someone who attests and claims the reward but then never again uses the wallet can’t really be called a user. On the other hand, once a use case that requires attestation is released this person can start immediately.

The most difficult problem to address with RNA is that in developing countries it is quite possible to offer someone a few $ to use their ID or passport and start claiming attestation rewards. We tried remedying this with locked amounts on smart contracts, but we’re sure some people are still taking the gamble and are just going to cash out a year from now, once the amounts unlock. Especially with smart vouchers you can now be a professional attestor and really make a lot of money (in countries where 5$ is a lot of money).

This is not really a sustainable model. We don’t want to give up on RNA rewards though. The bot has been down for maintenance, when it comes back online the rewards will be reduced to $10 for a referral and $16 for a successful attestation.

We’re open to suggestions on how to further improve this method. There is an option to make real name attestation more difficult for fraudsters, but that would also make attestation more difficult for legitimate users. It’s a tough balancing act.

This is my personal favorite because it really shows the beauty of Byteball, having no miners and thus not wasting energy. Anyone with some spare computing power can participate and be rewarded for it. The cause is very good which makes it a schoolbook example of a win-win situation. However (there always seems to be a however) again there are people trying to make large amounts of money by aggregating computing power from unsuspecting users or cheating their employer out of electricity. We already adjusted the rules once but we are going to have to do it again.

The whole method is meant for new users to be able to discover Byteball while donating some spare CPU power to a good cause, not for a few people to make a lot of money! Conclusion: also not sustainable in its current form.

For now we are going to reduce the reward to $1 per 1,000,000 WCG points earned, effective from Monday December 24 on. This way it will still work like a faucet but it will be much harder to make a profit, which was never intended. We’ll monitor what this change does and make further changes when necessary.

Adoption by merchants is a tough nut to crack. What’s happening in Milan is basically the way to go but you need someone on the ground who is very dedicated and a huge fan, otherwise it’s not really going to work. A few merchants scattered here and there is not going to do much. People might jump through a few hoops just to get a nice discount but that’s not what this program is about. The method doesn’t cost very much at the moment but also doesn’t bring much to the table with regards to actual adoption. We do think there is some potential here so suggestions on how to improve it are very welcome.

Probably the method that made the biggest waves, more than 70,000 Steem users attested their username and claimed the rewards. The idea behind this distribution was to attract developers and content creators. Very, very good things have come from this but in the end when you look at cost versus results this was also a very expensive experiment. The actual % of people who stick around and actively contribute or engage with the community is quite low. This could have a number of reasons that I could talk about forever, but it is what it is.

We have adjusted the rules a few times here as well because there were people making money by boosting the reputation of old (bought or hacked) accounts with Steem Power. It’s a cat and mouse game really, but quite easy for us to see when it’s profitable again for people to do this and remedy it. So we can keep the method around but it probably won’t bring much benefit anymore.

Where to begin? :) Many people in the community have asked us time and again to bring a distribution method back for holders of Bytes, like we had with the Full Moon Airdrops back in the day.

So we tried to come up with a free draw for all Bytes holders where you get a little bonus chance when you have attested your identity. There were some red flags but we decided to go ahead and just try it out. As expected reaction has been mixed, but there has been more negative feedback than we anticipated.

We knew that it would favor whales just as the Moondrops did, that’s just a fact of life, but we didn’t expect whale dominance to be as high as it was for the first draw. If many new users would have joined, with just a few MB or GB the whales’ share might be diluted enough to not be a problem, but it clearly was. We changed the rules for attested whales, but the effect of that change will be seen on the 21st of December draw.

On top of that some people got a lot of real name attested referrals with almost exactly 10GB in balance on them, giving them a much bigger chance to win. While allowed it is kind of fishy. Of course it could be someone who managed to get his whole family or school interested in buying 10GB and attest but more likely it is some professional attestor who is at the very least bending the rules, but more likely abusing the system.