Announcing the Steem Use-a-Thon by Byteball

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Since the airdrop, almost 70,000 Steem users have linked their Steem username to their Byteball wallet. 5,400 GBYTE was distributed to users while 8,500 GBYTE are locked in smart contracts to be released next year.

Here's your chance to get more Bytes

To encourage users to explore the Byteball platform and the possibilities it offers, Byteball hereby announces a contest in creating innovative use cases during the contest period.

Steem users are encouraged to compete. The prizes for the best ideas are:

• 1st place: 10 GBYTE
• 2nd place: 5 GBYTE
• 3rd place: 2 GBYTE

Users are encouraged to share their progress on their Steem blog. Every Sunday during the contest period, a jury of Byteball staff and veterans will pick the most interesting, promising, fun, ingenious or remarkable progress report and the user will be rewarded with 1 GBYTE. The weekly winner will be announced in a weekly contest update posted on this blog. All prizes will be transferred to the wallet used when paying the entry fee.

How to particpate

To join the contest, participants pay an entry fee of 25 MB. The entry fee must be paid from a publicly attested Steem user’s Byteball wallet. This allows us to keep track of participants and to follow your progress on your blogs. All entry fees are added to the prize pool and distributed on a 10:5:2 ratio between the prizes.

Send your 25 MB entry fee to this address

EPZEMB73FGY7O6XMTGA2SFQIDUUV4NT5

What is a Use-a-Thon?

You have probably heard about hack-a-thons, where developers and engineers develop new features for a given product by altering code, hardware or tweaking the product.

A Use-a-Thon doesn’t require development or engineering skills. The aim is to explore, experiment and apply the existing features to solve a real-world problem or fulfill an existing need either online or offline in a local community. So while creating new chat bots and oracles is an option, it’s not required at all. A previous Byteball Use-a-Thon proved that users are able to apply the platform to real-world use cases without knowing programming or underlying technologies at all.

What is a use case?

A use case is a real-world problem or need that can be addressed with the given tool. Some (but not all) examples could be: introducing smart contracts to enable trustless value exchange between two parties, a web-based mini-game, disrupting an existing market, creating a new service allowing Byteball users to purchase products, allowing Steem users to send tips to each other, creating a private token to be used in an incentive program, or even creating a small business that potentially generates profit for you.

Basically, anything goes as long as it involves using the Byteball platform and its features.

When is the contest?

NOW! From the date of this announcement, users can join by paying the entry fee. You can enter as an individual or gather a team to help explore, develop and realize your use case. Each participant is free to create more than one entry.

The contest ends 30 September 2018, 11:59:59 UTC. You must create a post on your blog by this date, describing your use case, current progress, plan for realization, milestones and any relevant information allowing the Jury to evaluate your project. The post must be in English, with the title “Byteball Use-a-Thon: [plus your own title]”, start with a summary (150 words or less), and then the additional information as described above. First tag must be “#byteball” and second tag must be “#useathon”.

After the deadline, a Jury consisting of @Punqtured, @Slackjore, @Tarmo888 and Suirelav will evaluate all contributions and determine the winners, who will be announced about a week later.

Where can I get more information?

With a constantly growing community, there is a vast library of available resources. Here is a list of some of relevant resources:
Steem Use-a-Thon Wiki page where all relevant information for the contest can be found.
Byteball Slack where users can seek help, ask questions and collaborate - please state that you are a participant in the Use-a-Thon.
Byteball Wiki contains information about all features, references to external sources etc.
Developer guides for those wanting to build entirely new stuff.
Easy-to-use JavaScript library to easily integrate Byteball features on websites without the need of headless wallets.
Byteball main GitHub repository for those wanting to dig deep.