Quote from: meterse on September 04, 2018, 12:16:16 PM

Quote from: Punqtured on September 03, 2018, 09:56:33 AM

Quote from: pineapple express on September 02, 2018, 10:42:39 PM

What are the results of the Venezuelan Use-a-Thon?

The winning project introduced a GBYTE/Fiat (Bolivares) gateway, making it more convenient for merchants to accept bytes as means of payment. They build their project incrementally starting off more or less manually handling all transactions and gradually introduce more and more automation and integration. So far, they have managed to successfully provide bank-transfers to/from 3 of that largest Venzuelan banks. Their volume is constantly increasing (stats not publicly available as government/regulation in Venezuela isn't exactly "safe") and it's the base foundation for more and more merchants wanting to shield their money from the insane inflation rates in the country. Even in bear markets and with depreciating price of basically any crypto, it's still far to prefer over their fiat currency that suffers inflation rates as high as 1000% per month. Consider that for a while, and then reconsider how everyone is whining in crypto these days ;-) (link: https://capybaraexchange.com)

Another project from the Use-a-Thon aims to replace the internal financial system of the Simon Bolivar University with Byteball. When a faculty applies for funding of a research project, the verification and acceptance process is rather bureaucratic and takes a long time. Once it is approved, the funds get transferred to the central financial department. This process costs extremely large fees to banks (and government) so already when the funds arrive, they have significantly decreased. From the central financial system, money are then distributed to each of the faculties/research projects again requiring large bank fees to be paid and yet another bureaucratic and lengthy process. When the money finally arrive to the research project, inflation and bank fees have rendered the granted funding to be insufficient and thus the projects cannot actually pay for the equipment or staff needed to complete the projects. For this use case, the far greatest hurdle to overcome has been to get through to the university management and get the legal consequences sorted. Thanks to one of our area representatives, who is a professor at the university, it allowed a better access to the right authorities at the university to move the project forward. The project is currently preparing to launch a beta test of the entire solution where they apply the Byteball platform to one particular set of courses, allowing external parties to pay for the courses using Bytes. Here, the Capybaraexchange comes in handy as well, as it allows the university to easily convert to/from Bolivares.

There is a third project that aims to support students financially for completing their trimester and passing their exams. Right now, the university experiences a whopping 60% of students not signing up for next trimester and thus never completing their education. The economic situation in Venezuela requires a lot of people to get a job to earn just a few dollars to be able to maintain a sustainable living. By providing a platform that allows external donors to directly "fund" a student with $3-5 a month provided they pass their exams and sign up for next trimester it is the hope that more students will be able to focus on their education and on the larger scale, be the possible change that the country so badly needs. The solution involves a student to verify their identity first before signining up to the program through an in-wallet bot. An Oracle taps into the central student system to read and post score and enrollment to the DAG for each student. If the student passes all exams, the donation stored on a smart contract will be released to the student. If not - it will be returned to the donor. No intermediaries or potentially corrupt middle man to interfere with the system. The project is currently just on the idea stage and the actual platform development still needs to be done. Again, legal issues are the main problem and getting university authorities to accept an oracle to tap into the central student system is the main hurdle. But again, the area representative will prove highly valuable to help out with that.

I don't visit bitcointalk a lot, but reading people's comments here - particularly those complaining about lack of activities, missing use cases and stuff like that - it's obvious that we generally need better forms of communicating what is actually going on. Don't you guys read the weekly newsletters? Aren't you reading the announcements on the Byteball Slack? Announcements are even relayed to our Telegram (https://t.me/byteball) so I'm actually rather surprised to learn how little "investors" apparently seem to care for their "investment" or how little effort they put into actively seeking information. It's not like any of the above have been kept secret or anything :-)

the whiners main concern is not lack of activities but the USD price of bytes

ironically many of them got their bytes for free

this type of degenerate behaviour is not isolated to byteball either

I have seen many ~~investors~~ whiners being concerned at 95% real terms USD drops on their ~~investments~~ bags