The competition is over, we saw a number of interesting entries, and the winners are named here:

https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-photo-competition-winner-annoucement-386133341ec1

Correct, that was the original vision.  However it is not easy to get big institutions as witnesses, that's why decentralization is progressing so slowly.

Another article in What's next series:

What’s next for Obyte: Community Radio Show

https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-community-radio-show-448a9b5cc1f4

Meet the first Ocademy workshop graduate

During the past week, developer Tarmo has been doing Obyte workshops in Estonia with a Japanese high school student, Akira.  After 4 days of non-stop workshops, this 16 year old student with no prior Node.js experience left Estonia with many new skills under his belt. A big thanks to Alvar from Bind Creative for making this internship happen.

Full story
https://medium.com/obyte/meet-the-first-ocademy-workshop-graduate-133617202c

Sports oracle has been updated to work with Autonomous Agents.  Now it can be requested to trigger an AA of your choice.  The AA, in turn, can process a payout to the winner of the bet, thus making it unnecessary to manually claim the winnings.  This is just one example of what an AA can do, developers are welcome to come up with other ideas and participate in the contest.

Full story: https://medium.com/obyte/sports-oracle-for-autonomous-agents-96b56369168a

Winners of the first round of developer contest are announced

https://medium.com/obyte/winners-of-the-first-round-of-the-autonomous-agents-developer-contest-bc8cbbe0d8b4

Fabien — A Simple DAO
1st prize, 140 GB and 422 GBB

Barborico — Bank With Secrets
2nd prize, 70 GB and 147.7 GBB

Pmiklos — Lottery With Community Governance
3rd prize, 35 GB and 73.85 GBB

Best guide:
Pmiklos Getting Started With Obyte Autonomous Agents
55 GB and 116.05 GBB

Congrats to the winners and looking forward to the next round in two weeks!
    

We are changing the way we communicate our development and other activities.

Previously, we developed products and updates for some time and then released them when they were ready to be used. Being focused on real working products and the problems they solve, we didn’t involve the community in something that didn’t exist yet, couldn’t be shown yet, couldn’t be used yet.

However, this practice has the downside that the community doesn’t know what we are working on, what’s next.

Now we are going to share more about our current work and what we are going to launch in the near term. Hopefully, we’ll get early feedback that will help us to better prioritize and adjust the design of future product releases. The community will know better what to expect from Obyte and developers will know how the platform is going to evolve.

The recent launch of Autonomous Agents on testnet already reveals the major update that is coming next to the production network. To make it clear what other new things are coming to the platform in the near future, we now start a series of What’s next blogs.

The first article speaks about “contracts with arbiters” functionality that we are currently building and expect to add to the platform in the near future. Contracts with arbiters allow for safe arbitrary contracts between two parties backed by a human language text and a trusted arbiter to be called to settle a dispute in case it should arise.

Read the full stories:

https://medium.com/obyte/whats-next-for-obyte-b495cfbb698

https://medium.com/obyte/whats-next-for-obyte-contracts-with-arbiter-7e625e05811a

A major update is coming to livenet in 2-4 months, today it was launched on testnet.

The update introduces Autonomous Agents and vastly increases the design space available to developers.

Here are some ideas of apps that can be created based on Autonomous Agents:

*    tradable shares in prediction markets;
*    futures contracts;
*    algorithmic stable coins;
*    synthetic assets;
*    other derivatives;
*    collateralized lending;
*    margin trading;
*    decentralized exchange;
*    decentralized oracles;
*    payment channels;
*    game economies;
*    market makers;
*    automatic management of investment portfolios;

Read the full story https://medium.com/obyte/introducing-autonomous-agents-6fe12fb12aa3



To encourage development of new apps and to extensively test the new functionality while it is still on testnet, we are simultaneously launching a developer contest

https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-autonomous-agents-developer-contest-6a67ae3dacd2

Every two weeks we'll have up to 4 winners:

Best apps:
    Winner: 140 GB + 422 GBB
    2nd place: 70 GB + 147.7 GBB
    3rd place: 35 GB + 73.85 GBB

Best tutorial/guide: 55 GB + 116.05 GBB

The prize pool comprises of undistributed funds that would otherwise have been spent in the weekly Draw Airdrop, making the draw a bi-weekly event.

Instead of distributing funds at random to existing Obyte users, money is instead spent on incentivizing creation of useful applications on the platform.

With this move, we are course-correcting our distribution policy and do not plan to launch any major distribution campaigns targeted at acquiring new users before a sufficient number of popular apps is built.

https://medium.com/obyte/distribution-outlook-bb28ff0b91aa

Most of the activity is on Discord now.  A couple of news that we didn't cross-post to this forum yet:

1. Fabien Marino added to witness list of Obyte default hub
https://medium.com/obyte/fabien-marino-added-to-witness-list-of-obyte-default-hub-5e57865e04bc





2. We are running a photo competition: Take a photo that features an O. Any O! The 3 best photos will be awarded a prize.


It could be a man-made O




Or an O that has occurred naturally in nature



Details: https://medium.com/obyte/show-the-world-your-creative-talents-and-enter-the-obyte-summer-photo-competition-56dc3a170436

Thanks for letting know, will be fixed in the next release.

Version 2.7.2 released https://github.com/byteball/obyte-gui-wallet/releases

* Fixed crashes of full wallets under some circumstances.
* Added backup reminder that pops up once the total balance exceeds $10 and urges you to create a backup.
* On Android, the app now displays where the backup was saved and allows to immediately share it to your other device or cloud storage (e.g. via Dropbox, email, Telegram, etc).
* Fixed a bug in message signing function when the message didn't contain any address.
* Fixed a bug in message signing function in iOS wallet, the signed message was incorrect.
* Fixed sending of textcoins via WhatsApp on Android.

iOS wallets already received the update a couple of days ago, the release for other platforms was delayed due to building issues on Android, which are now solved.

After long preparation, Obyte Foundation is finally established

https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-foundation-is-established-c92a28d2d20e

Obyte version 2.7.0 released, some highlights:

Added ability to create and sign classic (prosaic, not smart) contracts. The contracts are optionally linked to real-name attested identities, like the classic contracts. Contract texts are saved privately in the wallets of the parties, their hashes are signed by both parties and posted to the DAG.

Full story https://medium.com/obyte/introducing-prosaic-contracts-5d3564638a20



Now it is possible to quickly search and sort the lists bots and contacts, which have grown too large lately:



Added an option to spend unconfirmed funds received from third parties, previously only unconfirmed change could be spent.  It is off by default.



On iPhone X and other top-notchy iPhones, the app now occupies the entire screen




Full list of updates:

* Updated branding from Byteball to Obyte
* Added ability to create and sign classic (prosaic, not smart) contracts.  The contracts are optionally linked to real-name attested identities, like the classic contracts. Contract texts are saved privately in the wallets of the parties, their hashes are signed by both parties and posted to the DAG.
* Added ability to specify a list of trusted real name attestors.  Received private profiles attested by trusted or untrusted attestors are visually indicated as such.
* Added ability to quickly search and sort contacts and bots
* Added an option to mute push notifications for individual correspondents (bots).
* Added an option to spend unconfirmed funds received from third parties, previously only unconfirmed change could be spent
* Human readable display of contracts now displays the peer's name rather than just "peer".  It matters most in contracts with more than one peer, such as ORider.
* On smart contract composition pages, added more helpful placeholders and links to instructions on wiki
* When binding a condition to a payment, allowed to set conditions where oracle-posted data is more or less than the specified value, previously only exact equality was supported
* Sign-a-message feature now allows to sign with any address which is a member of the wallet, not just the last address
* Lists of addresses in multisig wallets are now synced among cosigner devices, which helps to automatically recover from loss of sync
* Extended the byteball: (obyte:) URI protocol to allow posting data (data feeds, attestations, polls, ...) by clicking a link on a website
* Added ability to claim several assets stored on a single textcoin address
* On iPhone X and other top-notchy iPhones, the app now occupies the entire screen
* Updated initial sync, full wallets no longer require large amounts of memory (and no longer run out of memory) when starting the initial sync or when syncing after a long period of being offline.
* The wallet now shows dollar value of some assets traded on the Exchange Bot, such as Future token
* Fixed a bug in Windows wallets which prevented it from opening byteball: links on websites.
* Fixed a bug that prevented multi-sig wallets from signing transactions in private currencies (such as blackbytes)
* Fixed a bug that caused some Android wallets to hang when restoring from backup
* Fixed a bug that crashed the wallet when requesting a custom asset payment with byteball: link and not having that particular asset in currently selected wallet
* Fixed a bug that prevented sign-a-message feature from working in multisig wallets
* Latest Tor Browser with Tor 0.3.5.x broke the socks5 passwordless handshake https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29175, now it is fixed
* Fixed a bug that sometimes caused Android 4.4 devices to crash when trying to restore from full backup
* New languages: Srpski, Filipino, Vietnamese, Yoruba
* Multiple minor bugfixes and improvements

Not as fast as we want, but we are continuing the decentralization of witnesses.

 Fabien Marino is the second independent witness candidate.  He is known for his obyte.js library, obyte.io explorer, busy.org, steemconnect.com, and DrugWars game (top app on https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings) which recently issued a token on Obyte.

Read the full announcement https://medium.com/obyte/second-independent-witness-candidate-fabien-marino-d4e8dccadee.

The decision about changing your witness list is up to you, see the instructions in the article.

We are launching a new method of identity verification for residents of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and e-residents of Estonia.

The new method is much cheaper (only $0.50) and much more reliable than Jumio.  It is available through the same real name attestation bot, which now offers a choice between Jumio and the new method.

https://medium.com/obyte/new-methods-for-identity-verification-3d5045287533

Thanks, good questions.
Yes, by 8 bytes - the size of the timestamp.


If a node's time lags, it will see recent units as coming from the future and will skip them when selecting parents, i.e. this node will take older parents.  This is not a big issue apart from slightly more branching of the DAG than we would see otherwise.

If transactions are sent to the DAG with a large lag, most nodes will see them timestamped in the far past, which means they are perfectly eligible for inclusion.

You can view this video to get an idea how Obyte is superior to just plain payments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhNyD8Cj0dg

There is a proposal about extending the Obyte protocol with timestamps
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L5i0NNL2h7tgf-ZXo18ozHABSlciQUAE5x0ynV7FzyQ/edit

Your opinion is appreciated.

In case someone missed the news, we are having a poll about the future exchange listings

https://medium.com/obyte/obyte-on-new-exchanges-92f8bb1d0506

Thanks for letting know, just fixed.