RE: Contest with up-votes as prize.
The contest does not really matter, it could be as simple as pick a number between 1 and 10. The fun part would be to make the rules so complicated you need to hire a lawyer, a priest, a doctor, then a politician to tell you if you have followed all the rules correctly and voted for the correct post, paid the right amount to the right account, then made a post with nothing but the number you pick, post your link in the comments, and then see how many votes you can buy to increase your blogs value that contains only one single digit number. After buying all the votes you possibly can, you need to run over to berniesanders, grumpycat, transisto, and haeijn and tell them all in a comment on an unrelated post how much you got for your one word post. He or she that survives wins.
So I take it you have seen the Place holder comment worth 200 by the guy who use to down vote everyone at will.
LoL, yep, seen a few of those types.