What is DigiByte?

DigiByte is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies on the market but is still relatively unknown. In 2012, dissatisfied with the transaction speed of Bitcoin, Texas-based computer programmer Jared Tate decided to make a few improvements to the Bitcoin main protocol. Soon after, in the autumn of 2013, he created a new cryptocurrency called DigiByte, which was officially launched without an initial token sale in 2014.

DigiByte is focused on cybersecurity for digital payments and decentralized applications and claims to be the “fastest, longest, most decentralized, and secure (unspent transaction output) UTXO blockchain in the world today.”

DigiByte’s community believes that because the asset cannot be destroyed, counterfeited, or hacked, that overtime its cutting-edge technology will overtake bitcoin, litecoin, and other digital currencies.

DigiByte as a challenge to the monopolies of the leading money transfer companies, such as Western Union and PayPal, that process over 1 million transactions and payments per day. However, according to Tate, the DigiByte technology is still in its infancy, so new ideas and use cases will continue to be developed.

The DigiByte blockchain

Abra founder and CEO Bill Barhydt in conversation with DigiByte founder Jared Tate.DigiByte is an open-source project. There are more than a dozen people from around the world working on its development. Additionally, unlike most of the significant blockchain projects, DigiByte has decided against a whitepaper, so there’s very little technical information on how the blockchain functions. Their official stance is “we want to be doers. Not white paper pumpers. It is much better to under-promise and over-deliver.” Combined with the lack of organized marketing effort, the no-whitepaper situation is probably one of the main reasons why DigiByte does not receive wide attention.

How DigiByte works

DigiByte blocks are mined every fifteen seconds (compared to the Bitcoin blockchain, which produces blocks every ten minutes. Considering that DigiByte has been around since 2014, this adds up to a very long chain of blocks and makes it the longest blockchain in existence. Yes, longer even than Bitcoin’s.

As for its claim for being the fastest blockchain, it seems to hold up. At the time of writing, there are around 200,000+ node operators on the DigiByte blockchain across six continents, while Bitcoin and Ethereum only have 9,000 and 16,000 respectively. A large number of nodes massively improves the speeds on the network. Currently, DigiByte can handle 560 transactions per second as its block time is 15 seconds. This is around 40x faster than Bitcoin, which can hold only 7 transactions per second, or Ethereum, which can process 15 transactions per second.

Faster block time means DigiByte’s network can process and confirm transactions much faster than any other top blockchain on the market. DigiByte was also one of the first major blockchains to adopt SegWit (segregated witness), a concept that allows for data related to signatures to be removed from DigiByte transactions making them smaller in size. This, in turn, makes the blocks smaller, meaning more transactions can be included in a block. DigiByte is now aiming to drastically increase this number to 280,000 transactions per second until 2035.

DigiByte has a reputation for being a pioneer in the crypto-development space. The team behind DigiByte have built some widely accepted security solutions, including DigiShield, MultiShield, and MultiAlgo, which have been implemented by many other blockchains. That’s a great achievement for DigiByte. The blockchain’s security is ensured by making the network as decentralized as possible. There are five different mining algorithms producing DGB, which helps to prevent mining centralization compared to single algorithm blockchains. To hack the DigiByte blockchain, an attacker would have to control a majority of at least three of the algorithm groups (51 percent attack).

The DigiByte price

The DigiByte price reflects larger movements in the cryptocurrency market.

DigiByte currently accounts for .07 percent market dominance (or total market cap makes up .07 percent of the entire cryptocurrency market cap.

DigiByte has 30 second block times and a total planned supply of 21 billion, of which 11.7 billion is currently in circulation.

DGB hit an all-time high price of .135235 on January 6, 2018.

The future of DigiByte

While DigiByte has made some serious gains in value in the last year or so (9,400% growth in value since 2014), there is still has a lot of work to do with gaining greater mass adoption. According to their website, the blockchain will soon move into the AI and IoT space. DigiByte’s advanced security features are expected to be particularly useful for ensuring security on IoT devices and services that require robust communications.

Looking for more information on altcoins like DigiByte? Check out our downloadable Ultimate Altcoin Guide.