DigiByte has been released in 2014, most of DigiByte code comes from Bitcoin, but the developers copy Bitcoin and call it a day, instead DigiByte is seen as heavily modified version of Bitcoin.
Most Bitcoins have probably heard of the difficulty adjustment. Every two weeks, the Bitcoin mining difficulty changes, but with DigiByte, instead of every two weeks, the mining difficulty adjusts in real time. These real-time adjustments make mining more efficient and are intended to actually increase network security. Fast forward to 2019, DigiByte developers implemented the dandelion plus plus upgrade. Dandelion is a security feature that hides the IP address of anyone sending a transaction on DigiByte. But since IP addresses are hidden, it makes it harder to associate a person with a specific address.
DigiByte developers are always looking for ways to improve the protocol even when it means adding new functionality. For example, they were the first blockchain to actually implement the scaling solution SegWit, and it wouldn’t be a blockchain striving for greatness without the addition of smart contracts, which are added via DigiAssets, a protocol that actually runs on top of the blockchain.
Now similar to other smart contract platforms, DigiByte users can create custom tokens as well as decentralized applications, also known as dApps. Developers hope to create a community of applications and tokens similar to what exists on Ethereum. One of the advantages of building on DigiByte is that the platform can scale. So although there’s going to be plenty of Ethereum’s scaling solutions coming online in 2021 and 2022, as of now, the base layer of Ethereum can only clear about 15 transactions per second, where as DigiByte can clear about 600 transactions per second, and some developers say that 2,000 transaction per second could be a possibility one day.
Lots of blockchains can scale and there’s certainly no shortage of smart contract platforms to choose from, but what really sets DigiByte apart from the competition is decentralization. So the DigiByte network is supported by more than 10,000 nodes that are distributed all over the world. And Bitcoin which is widely considered to be one of the most decentralized cryptocurrencies in the world has about 11,000 nodes. So these numbers suggest that the DigiByte and Bitcoin are in the same ballpark, if we ever got to a point where governments were trying to shut down cryptocurrencies, DigiByte could become very valuable since this decentralized network would make it more resilient than other coins.
Also, another important point, there’s a maximum supply of 21 billion DGB tokens and all of these coins will be mined by 2035. In other words, DigiByte will be fully mined within 15 years. And that’s very different from Bitcoin which won’t be fully mined until halfway through the 22nd century. Even if it’s not especially popular, DigiByte is still an interesting cryptocurrency. It’s surprisingly decentralized, the real-time mining difficulty adjustment is arguably better than Bitcoins, and DigiByte has been around for seven years, making it one of the oldest cryptocurrencies.
transcribed from original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0GU8dYKwkU
