Exploring Obyte Use Cases (Part 1): Programmable Payments, Chatbots, and Beyond

A Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) system like Obyte may sound too complex for common mortals. However, you don’t need to know how everything works to make good use of it. There’s a lot of complex technology in our everyday lives: from electronics to digital apps. We can see (and use) Obyte just like that: an ecosystem of useful apps, available without technical steps.

Whether you're new to cryptocurrencies or an experienced enthusiast, Obyte provides an accessible and user-friendly environment for exploring the potential of distributed ledgers. In this article, we will delve into Obyte's potential use cases and how they greatly improve common tasks. 

Pay (and keep your money) without middlemen

Paying for stuff is, undoubtedly, a common task. It happens almost every day in our lives, and there’s a whole system behind it. Or numerous systems. Usually, a central bank mints new money, according to governmental policies. Then, it distributes that money first to banks and other financial institutions. The funds eventually end up in the hands of average citizens. 

However, banks and similar companies are often middlemen between people and their own money. They have limitations and requirements, and can even make serious mistakes and go bankrupt —endangering the money of their clients. You can avoid all these risks (and middlemen) by using decentralized cryptocurrencies, like GBYTE in Obyte. This way, no one but yourself will be able to handle your money.

Add automatic conditions, privacy, and new ways to send and receive

Besides the total control of your funds, Obyte also offers programmable money. For example, by binding a digital payment to a specific condition, anyone could recover their money in the case that condition (like receiving a package or losing a bet) isn’t met during a reasonable period. Obyte Wallet offers this function (conditional payments) in a user-friendly way, without any coding.

If what you want is more private transactions, you can get that too. Obyte has a native privacy coin, known as Blackbytes (GBB). This asset, unlike the transparent GBYTEs, only publishes its encrypted data (hashes) on the DAG. The rest of the information (involved wallets, amount, dates, previous path, etc.) is sent directly to the recipient(s) via end-to-end encrypted private message. Only they can see and own this data since GBB isn’t even available in centralized cryptocurrency exchanges. It’s a truly P2P (peer-to-peer) asset.

In addition, every token in Obyte (including GBYTE and GBB) can be sent to anyone via email, chats, and even paper. The recipient doesn’t need a digital wallet to receive the funds, only to spend them. This feature is called “textcoins” and virtually everyone could receive one because they’re only the password to access a small treasure.

In practice, textcoins are a string of twelve random words containing funds (like a wallet seed) or a simple link in the email or chat. Someone with an Obyte personal wallet can create and give away textcoins to anyone, even if they don’t have any crypto wallet or Internet. When they do, they can easily claim the textcoin from their Obyte wallet.

Chat privately with anyone (and exchange contracts)

The Obyte wallet includes an encrypted chat, whose data will never touch any digital cloud. No one will be able to see, let alone sell, your private conversations here because no one has access to them but yourself and the other involved party.

You can talk to people (contacts) there, or simply pick a chatbot to complete a task. A chatbot is a simple program written in NodeJS, designed to carry out simple tasks like exchanging, verifying IDs, making polls, or offering external data. Its connection with the server and the wallet is achieved through WebSockets (a protocol for real-time communication) and an Obyte hub.

The hub is an Obyte storage node. It’s the only intermediary in the whole process, but it can’t decipher the messages by itself. Those messages (including the ones sent to a chatbot) are always stored in the user(s) device(s), and not in the cloud. Therefore, we can’t expect those devices to be online all the time. That’s the hub’s ‘raison d’être’: a service for (temporarily) storing and forwarding private messages to connected devices.

Offering contracts

In this private environment, you can offer legal contracts to your contacts. They can be smart, prosaic, or with arbitration. Conditional payments are, indeed, a form of smart contract. This type of contract locks the funds until some event happens (or doesn’t happen). 

On the other hand, a prosaic contract is a more traditional and textual agreement but is registered forever on the DAG (only the contract’s hash is registered on the DAG, not the whole contract; it remains private between the parties). Instead of a hand-written signature, both parties sign their agreement with their Obyte wallets. The signatures created in the process are completely valid digital signatures. It’s legally binding, but it doesn’t lock any funds. Courts would do so instead, like in traditional contracts.

Finally, contracts with arbitration are a mix between prosaic contracts and smart contracts. You can write whatever terms you want and share them with the other party, just like in a prosaic contract. However, contracts with arbitration can lock funds until the conditions are met. If there’s a disagreement, an external arbiter previously chosen by both parties will solve the dispute. 

Create a shared account for savings (and security)

Obyte offers the creation of multi-signature accounts, allowing multiple parties (or devices) to control funds jointly. This feature is especially useful for shared savings accounts, collaborative projects, or managing money in a decentralized manner. Besides, multi-signature accounts provide an additional layer of security and enable efficient collaboration between individuals or organizations.

At the moment of spending funds from the multi-signature address, a required number of parties (such as 2 out of 3) must sign (approve) the transaction. If they don’t agree, then the funds can’t be moved. If they do agree, the transaction will appear in the history of all the involved devices.

Along with this shared account, you can also keep any number of other individual or shared accounts in the same wallet. Multi-device accounts can be used not only by different users (such as a family wallet or a company wallet) but also by a single user as a way of Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). This is the best way to increase the security of your Obyte wallet and it is very easy to use.

We’ll continue with even more use cases for everyone in the second part. Obyte is a big ecosystem!