DigiByte 101

What if I told you that there was a better Bitcoin and it’s called Digibyte?

You’d probably say that you’ve heard that for the umpteenth time already and that nothing surprises you anymore.

You may be saying that every little altcoin or project out there, is just a Bitcoin clone with a few tweaks or improvements.

You won’t be entirely wrong since Bitcoin really is the mother of all coins.

Get Excited and Get Your Mind Blown By What’s Coming

For this course, I’ve decided to take on an alternate route. Let’s shake things up a bit so it won’t be another boring course with me as your droning professor. We’re going to change our mindset about cryptocurrencies with this simple question: Could it hypothetically replace Bitcoin? 

Now before any Bitcoin maximalist throws rotten eggs in my direction, chill! It’s hypothetical and all in the spirit of actually furthering Bitcoin’s cause. If we look at altcoins in this manner, we’ll all be asking, why can’t Bitcoin be more like this? Bitcoin developers would then be forced to double their efforts in making it better. It then creates a competitive situation where developers seek to code the best implementation.

It’s a win-win scenario for the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Let’s start with these general assumptions and take the details in the following lessons:

DigiByte is Better than Bitcoin because:

1. It’s faster with less than one second transfers and 15 second block confirmation times.
2. It is more secure with Multiple Proof of Work algorithms at play (5).
3. Has more advanced security capabilities with DigiShield and MultiShield.
4. It truly is decentralized with over 200,000 nodes, servers, desktop PCs and even phones participating.

Quick Facts:

• Founder: Jared Tate (Linked.In) (Twitter)
• Launch Date: January 10th, 2014
• Origin: Fork of Litecoin (Scrypt)
• Github: (DigiByte)
  • Projects: DigiByteGaming, DigiByte Market, Digitip
    • DiguSign
    • Digi-ID
• Blockchain Explorer: https://digiexplorer.info/
• Bitcointalk (Bitcointalk) (Official Bitcointalk Account)
• Participating Nodes
  • Historical and Claimed: over 190,000+
  • Live
• Blockchain Type: Public, Decentralized, UTXO based, Multi-Algorithm
• Ticker Symbol: DGB
• Genesis Block Hash: “USA Today: 10/Jan/2014, Target: Data stolen from up to 110M customers”
• Max Total Supply: 21 Billion DigiBytes in 21 Years (2035)
• Current Supply: 8,107,031,908 DGB (May 2017)
• Yearly Supply Inflation: 12% in 2017
• Block Reward Reduction: 1% Monthly
• Current Block Reward 891 DGB
• Mining Algorithms: Five (Sha256, Scrypt, Groestl, Skein & Qubit)
• Block Timing: 15 Second Blocks, (1.5 Minutes per algo)
• Algo Block Share: 20% Block Share Per Algo (5)
• Difficulty Retarget Every 1 Block, 5 Separate Difficulties, 1 For Each Mining Algo
• SegWit Support Yes. First major altcoin to successfully activate Segwit. (April 2017)
• Hardforks 4. DigiShield, MultiAlgo, MultiShield, DigiSpeed
• Softforks 3. SegWit, CSV, NVersionBips
• You can mine DigiByte on one of five separate mining algorithms. Each algo averages out to mine 20% of new blocks. This allows for much greater decentralization than other blockchains. In order for an attacker to hardfork DigiByte the attacker would need to control 93% of the hashrate on 1 algo, and 51% of the other 4 making DigiByte much more secure against PoW attacks than other blockchains.