Using processing power only to mine crypto?
Help cure diseases and still get rewarded!

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Byteball platform
• The World Community Grid project
• Guide to get started

Introduction?

The ridiculous amount of electricity being consumed to mine cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed the past few years. Even with introduction of ASIC miners, it's estimated that the Bitcoin blockchain alone continuously consumes 343 Megawatts! That's the equivalent of the energy consumption of 285,000 average households! And that's even assuming all miners to run energy efficient setups. That's far from the case.

The need for this lies in the block discovery mechanism, aiming to prevent spam, secure network integrity, achieve consensus and enforce other rules in a decentralized topology.

Needless to say, the consumption of this amount of energy does little good to society, environment or the global population as a whole. It generates more wealth to those already wealthy enough to run huge mining farms.

Enter the Byteball Platform

The energy problems has lead to a myriad of projects trying to introduce alternative ways of ensuring the same network integrity without incurring the massive energy costs related to Proof of Work; like Proof of Stake, Proof of Stake anonymous, Delegated Proof of Stake, Proof of Activity, Proof of Checkpoint and even Proof of Brain (you're reading an article on a platform based on this very method!) and a variety of slightly differing combinations of voting and staking.

Byteball's DAG based consensus algorithm doesn't require any energy-consuming mechanism to maintain network integrity. It relies on fees to prevent spam, and transactions from nodes relies on referencing previous transactions. If double spends are attempted, the transaction that has been referenced by more witnesses will be considered legit.

Byteball rewards you for donating CPU power to fight diseases

World Community Grid is a platform that provides raw computing power to science projects aiming to find cures for diseases like cancer, ebola and AIDS. Analyzing data and vast combinatory possibilities require lots and lots of raw computing power. IBM has therefore helped launch an initiative, where normal people can donate their computers' idle time to the good of science. After downloading the WCG-client, your computer will be sent a small fraction of work to be analyzed. Your computer will process the data and when done, the client returns the result to World Community Grid where it gets validated. If your result validates, you are awarded points.

This is where Byteball comes into play. With a substantial amount of undistributed funds, the Byteball community has set out to prove a very important point. Computational power can be used for actual good causes rather than making a single person rich. One might add, that distributing funds via a cause like this, instead of using it to provide a solid bag of gold to distributors of x-rated content, would generally be applauded by most.

Developers have created a way to directly link your Byteball wallet to your World Community Grid account. Once your computer starts generating points, you will receive payouts in Bytes according to your contribution to the World Community Grid.

A quick guide to linking your wallet with WCG

Assuming you already installed the Byteball wallet.

Step 1 - Find the WCG bot in the Bot Store

Click the chat-button at the bottom of the wallet. Select the "Bot Store" tab and locate the WCG Bot. Click on it and hit the huge "Add" button.

Step 2 - Create or edit your World Community Grid account

Whether you have an existing account at World Community Grid or not, the bot will give you a username. If you don't already have an account, create a new one and be sure to use the username given by the bot. If you already have an account, go to "Settings" and click the "My Profile" button on the left. It will ask for your username and password before allowed to change anything. When validated, you can change your username to that given by the bot.

Step 3 - Link your wallet and WCG account

Go back to the bot and click "Check my account". The bot will then connect to World Community Grid and look for the account with the username it gave you. If it finds a matching account, it will then respond with "Your WCG account is successfully linked."

Step 4 - Choose your payout address

The bot will then ask which address you want rewards sent to. If you want rewards sent to the wallet that is active when entering the chat with the bot, simply click the three little dots at the bottom left and click "Insert my address".

That's it! You're done now!

When everything is done and setup, the bot will tell you that setup has been completed. You can then go to WCG and change your account name to whatever you like (see steps above) - remember to also change the name with the bot by clicking the "Change account name" link. The bot will then ask what your new account name is, and validate that this was indeed your new account name.

Get help on Slack or Telegram

Should you run into problems with linking your accounts or have questions not related to the WCG platform, you are welcome to post it on the Byteball Slack or Telegram.