In case you missed the announcement of the contest please do yourself a favor and check it out. There is no deadline for entering the contest, and it's super easy too. See the announcement for details on how to join.

First weekly update

Each week, we will post an update to help participants and interested bystanders follow the contest as it progresses. It is also the post where the winner of the weekly 1 GBYTE award for best progress/most interesting update will be announced.

When launching a contest like this, to users with whom we have no direct way of communication, it’s always exciting to see how it gets received.

Competing for the 10 GBYTE grand prize

Even though the contest is still in its early stages there are already seven participants who have joined the race to claim the total of 22 GBYTEs in prize money. There are indications that more will follow over the course of the next few weeks. The winners will be announced at the beginning of October.

Four of the existing contestants have already made blog posts about their projects, and the Byteball team is thrilled to see their creativity and innovation.

In order to be considered for the weekly award for best update, contestants need to share a blog post about their progress, preferably in a way allowing both experienced Steem users and “outsiders” to understand the ideas and see the benefits of the project.

The contestants

The contestants and other relevant info is continually kept up to date on the Use-a-Thon wiki page.

There you can see that the four Steemians that posted updates are @lightsplasher, @grow-pro, @drsensor and @genievot.

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@lightsplasher provides a use case introducing an alternative way to sell votes in a way that allows a vote to be bound to certain conditions by the use of Byteball smart contracts.

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@grow-pro along with his partner @Jackmiller have already proven their use case is sustainable and has real-world application by providing a Bytes-Steem exchange service reducing much of the hassle for users when exchanging between the two assets.

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@drsensor introduces an idea that would enable easy and convenient outsourcing of tasks and subsequent rewarding of contributors by use of Byteball Smart Contracts enabling trust between two unknown or sometimes anonymous parties on GitHub/GitLab.

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@genievot’s idea is to develop a new freelancing platform bringing together project owners and contributors. Using the Byteball platform makes it possible to reduce the heavy fees of existing solutions.

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The above explanations are intentionally kept very short and we highly suggest people following this Use-a-Thon read their articles to fully grasp the ingenious ideas the contestants have come up with so far. Here are links to the relevant blog posts

Determining the weekly winner for best update

It’s important to underline the fact that the actual ideas and use cases won’t be assessed before the end of the competition. Therefore, the weekly award of 1 GB doesn’t take the concrete projects into account but solely focuses on the quality of the update posts from the contestants.

To what extent are they able to capture the reader’s imagination?
How good are they at describing their ideas in an engaging and interesting way?
How easy are they to understand for normal users?
And finally, how did the contestants manage to maintain a logical structure to their project posts?

The jury had a rough time, since the entries were overall super high quality. We voted and reached a decision on who should be awarded the 1 GB September 2nd weekly award for the best post, and the winner is:

@Genievot

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Here is the 1 GB award being paid to his registered account.

And the corresponding Byteball transaction unit

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.