The cryptocurrency that nobody is talking about, but that could be bigger than Bitcoin

A couple months ago, in early April, I was wading through the depths of CoinMarketCap.com and the inflated pool of cryptocurrencies into which I wanted to move some of my Bitcoin. Many of them seemed like a bunch of "meh, this is all the same thing as Bitcoin. Many of these don't bring anything new to the table. Bitcoin is still the standard." It was then I noticed a familiar-named currency sitting at around #50 on the market cap list, but sitting at #2 in BTC/USD value, the only currency behind Bitcoin in USD price (at that time, that was around $100USD and 90mBTC).

This currency was called Byteball.

Being an IT guy, and immediately noticing the word "byte", my attention was grabbed. The icon was a white circle, with no real flare; nothing flashy. Simple. I looked at the market cap history and noticed that just days before I noticed it, it was only around $60. It had almost doubled in hours. Not gonna lie, the greedy asshole in me was intrigued.

My mind went to, "OK, if it's sitting at $100, it has to be SOMETHING special.. right?" So, I went to the website and was further impressed by the simplicity of the layout. Immediately the question is asked, "Why use Byteball?", and the answer is: conditional payments.

Well that sounds interesting. Let's keep reading.

Untraceable currency? Now THAT'S a feature worth having! Fuck the government, my funds and transactions are between me and the other party.

OK, so far we have a low-volume currency sitting at #2 on the BTC/USD list, and some features that some other cryptos like Monero/Zcash are using. But that conditional payments.. there's something to that. Smart contracts (although not the kind you would have with Ethereum).

The part that really caught my attention was this: Byteball data is stored and ordered using directed acyclic graph (DAG) rather than blockchain.

It was at that point I pulled up the whitepaper to read more. During my reading, I was taken aback at how well put-together and intricate the detail of the entire concept. Byteball essentially does the following:

• No block size limitations (since there's no blocks); users confirm each others' transactions by transacting and referencing a previous transaction. Users (I believe only full nodes and/or Witnesses) earn that fees from transactions they confirm.
• Since no blocks need to be mined, there's no miners. Instead of a Proof-of-Work consensus, there are 12 public, reputable entities that exist on the Byteball network called Witnesses. Essentially, these Witnesses serve as a way for users to agree with each other on the version of reality within the DAG, and transactions tend to follow Witnesses, therefore forming a "Main Chain". Of course, being a decentralized cryptocurrency, Witnesses can be replaced practically at the will of the users. If a Witness acts malicious, they stand to lose their reputation as a Witness, and therefore lose the (little bit of) power they do have.
• Smart Contracts that ANYBODY can make and use -- If I choose to pay you 4,000 bytes for a cup of coffee, I can take that payment back if you don't give me my coffee in, say, 10 minutes. (I'm oversimplifying that a bit, but that's the general idea).

This may start sounding like a sales pitch, and I guess it sort of is, but the fact that brand new technology that replaces everything Bitcoin does and does a LOT that Other cryptocurrencies are trying to do, makes me wonder why at this point in time, Byteball is only sitting at around 300 mBTC and is not already over 1BTC. This type of technology where users are in control instead of (ever more centralized) mining operations is something that has been needed for a long time. Mining pools defeat the entire purpose of the PoW consensus, because if any one pool, or if enough pools reside in any one place (*cough cough* China *cough cough*), then that consensus is at risk of being overtaken by a malicious player, and the entire system crashes.

I highly recommend to anybody technical that they read the whitepaper. 

To me, Byteball is a superior system to Bitcoin. Only time will tell if it catches on in the same ways.