I really don't get this obsession for Discord, why is it so important to vote on Discord rather than using the forum?
Cyrus (or someone else) will correct me if I am wrong, but idea of having Bitcoin pizza bakeoff on Discord was a sort of attempt to make Bitcointalk Discord server more lively and it kinda became tradition to host it there.
Discord is just a mess and there is plenty of space to cheat, it totally kills the contest.
It makes cheating much easier, that's for sure. And unfortunately, when there is money incentive there will always be certain amount of people that will try to cheat.
I didn't even know there was a Bitcointalk Discord server and I don't understand the point, were should we discuss? On the forum? On Discord? Then what about Telegram? Maybe I'm old school (or just old) but the forum is more than enough, I don't get why posting on the forum and then posting also on Discord and voting there, and all the merits earned on the forum (for the pizzas) are pointless. And not everyone has/uses Discord. It's my first year participating but it's all very confusing to be honest.
In that case, I would like to add an additional 5 mBTC to the prize pool (on behalf of MixTum).
However, if we come up with some more transparent and at the same time simple and fun way to vote, I would make sure that next year the prize pool would be several thousand dollars in bitcoins.
I know that you have best intentions, but if people keep adding more money to this contest, it will just create more drama and there will more complaints and more cheat attempts. Thats simply how it goes around here.
Imho, pizza badge should be reward enough and that way you would eliminate a lot of bad things from happening and still keep it somewhat fun and relax contest.
I'm totally down for the pizza badge alone, and I would make it permanent, not just for one year. If someone wins again then he'll have 2 badges instead of one.