DigiByte History

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DigiByte was created on the 10th of January 2014, by Jared Tate.

 

DigiByte Overview

DigiByte was created by programmer and entrepreneur Jared Tate with the goal of creating a fast and secure cryptocurrency that could reach a wider and more decentralized community than Bitcoin. The first DigiByte block was mined on January 10, 2014, and included the headline from USA Today: “Target: Data stolen from up to 110M customers," hashed into the Genesis Block to mark the importance of security in digital transactions. Also included was a small 0.5% pre-mine to pay initial mobile-app developers and early downloaders of the blockchain to foster and encourage adoption.

DigiByte pioneered asymmetrical difficulty adjustment mining with DigiShield, which is a widely used technology and the basis of many other blockchains. It is also the first to blockchain to fork from a single proof-of-work algorithm to multi-algorithm mining.

The DigiByte blockchain is spread over a 200,000+ servers, computers, phones, and nodes worldwide.

Early days / Pre-launch

More details to come about the reasons for launching DigiByte, how Jared got into Bitcoin and then DigiByte, decision behind 1000:1 ratio etc

 

The Launch

  • 21 Billion total supply
  • 72000 DGB initial block reward
  • Count-down via BitcoinTalk
  • 0.5 % Pre-Mine (Explain distribution of it etc)

Hard Forks

History of hard forks of DigiByte

DigiShield

Block 67,200. February 28th, 2014

Activated in February 2014 this hard fork allowed for the DigiByte blockchain to protect against multi-pools that mine large numbers of DigiByte at a low difficulty. It achieves this by recalculating block difficulty between each block, allowing for a faster correction when a multi-pool begins or ceases contributing to DigiByte, rather than recalculating once every fortnight as is the case with Bitcoin. The DigiByte Core developers assisted the Dogecoin team to successfully implement DigiShield in early 2014 to help resolve the wild swings in chain difficulty. Since then DigiShield has been added into over 25 other cryptocurrency blockchains such as Bitcoin Cash, Startcoin, Zcash, Aurora Coin, Bitcoin Gold, BitTokens, Creative Coin, Granite, Huncoin, Monacoin, Mooncoin, Nautiluscoin, Quatloo, Sakura Coin, Scorecoin, SmartCoin, StartCoin, SuperiorCoin and Ubiq.

MultiAlgo

Block 145,000. September 1st 2014

Activated in September 2014 from Myriadcoin source code, this hard fork allowed for multi-algorithm mining. Its purpose was to create a number of different proof of work (PoW) mining methods to accommodate the different types of mining capabilities that exist, such as dedicated ASIC mining, GPU and CPU mining. This allows for a larger number of people to access DigiByte mining pools and therefore it creates a more decentralized blockchain with the coins reaching groups who were unable to mine the coin on its original single-algorithm (Scrypt).

MultiShield

Block 400,000. December 10th 2014

Activated in December 2014, this hard fork worked to activate DigiShield across the new MultiAlgo platform and accomplish the same goals on all five mining pools.

 

DigiSpeed

Block 1,430,000 Dec. 4th 2015

Activated in December 2015 this was a hard fork that focused on making the DigiByte coin Transaction speeds faster. Block time was reduced by 50% to 15 seconds and new block propagation code was added based on Microsoft Research. This allows DigiByte to handle up to 560 transactions per second. Every 2 years the DigiByte blockchain's dynamic system doubles the number of transactions per second by doubling the block size. In 2017, capability reaches 560 transactions per second, with a maximum capability of 280,000 transactions per second to be reached in 2035.

Soft fork

In April 2017 DigiByte became the first major cryptocurrency blockchain (second only behind Groestlcoin) to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit) via the DigiSync soft fork. The technical milestone laid the foundation for cross chain transactions and atomic swaps, while also resolving the transaction malleability bug that affected all UTXO blockchains.