In case of that example of 49 200 bytes and 49 689, I think first one didn't get the referral because 49 200 is not enough to do the attestation, the attestation fee is 49 000, but the transaction cost is something like 588 bytes, so you would need to send at least 49 588 bytes to do the attestation and if someone input fits better then it will take that one (or something like that).
People are little bit confused about the Byte sizes, so I wrote this post to explain
https://busy.org/@tarmo888/how-many-gbytes-is-20-dollars-and-how-many-steem-users-can-get-byteball-rewards
If that is the case, that really sucks.
I wish I had known that hours ago. And either way... if the scammers hadn't been there, we would have figured it out on our own.
It is really low on their part. Sad.
Just a followup. There was no solution. The scammer scanned the blockchain in real time and stole the referral. Nothing was done to resolve the matter as far as I can tell. At least, not retrospectively. They may have fixed things moving forward. But so far as I heard, the culprit got off with thousands, scott free.
Thousands of bytes or thousands of referrals? Anyway. That is really crummy. Good thing it wasn't real money from your bank account or anything!!
Yeah. No cool that scammers can cheat so horribly
Yeah, if there is free money then there is always scammers that's why fair distribution is one of the hardest thing to do and most cryptocurrencies just do ICOs.