Everyone can now check out the winners of the second edition of the Byteball Use-a-Thon - Steem edition.

There's a brief summary of all the use cases that are now being explored. While we of course know that some contestants will abandon their ideas, we also know that some of them will definitely be realized in the time to come.

Check out the post here: Steem Use-a-Thon by Byteball - Winners Announcement

Question? Wanting to know more about the contestants? Have an idea for how the next Use-a-Thon could potentially look like? Hit me up either on Slack or Telegram :-)

Luckily, it's getting a bit too obvious to even new users visiting here, that the pineapple dude has one single purpose with his postings here.

But let's take it to a positive spin instead of bashing the poor kid. It provides us with an excellent excuse to let people know what's actually happening with the project from time to time.

During the past week, Byteball core members all travveled to Barcelona to meet and discuss the future events and overall strategy of the project. There are several initiatives to be announced in the weeks to come. Firstly, the approach to getting the platform and its vast features and possibilities in the hands of users and creative minds in order to explore real world use cases. An area that all projects find themselves struggling with. There are conferences and events scheduled, where the benefits of the Byteball platform will be explored by people without any prior knowledge of the platform or programming skills at all. This will inevitably lead to a multitude of new and exciting use cases that may differ from the usual "when new exchange" and "when moon" peoples' comprehension. But we are totally fine with that.

Another important thing to note was last Tuesday's meetup in Barcelona. Here, head of strategyValerius Coppens and Head of PR introduced the Byteball platform to the 60-70 participants and later joined a panel debate with a specially invited speaker from Spanish telecom company Telefonica. The interesting thing about the line-up was that he was refreshingly critical to distributed ledger technology in general, claiming that he could build everything that blockchains (and DAGs) has to offerwithout the need of DLT. It was an interesting and sober debate with some highly relevant topics that most projects would have a hard time to come up with proper answers to. But Valerius and Luke completely killed it, leavi g the entire audience convinced of the bright future of DLT in general and Byteball in particular. Video from the event will be released as soon as we have the final version from the Alpha Blockchain crew, who were so kind to record the entire event.

This weekend is also the time that the winners of the Steem Use-a-Thon will be announced, so I highly encourage everyone to follow the Byteball.org user ON Steem and read about the interesting use cases that we will hopefully come to see realized in the following months.

The decentralization of witnesses is also progressing. Not quite as fast as we had hoped, but of the current candidates, there is active work being put into the first 4 decentralization that we hope to be able to announce shortly.

Finally, I'd like to take a moment to thanks the participants of the Use-a-thon and encourage others (even the pineapple kid) to get in touch with me if you have any ideas or suggestions for events, contests or Use-a-thons. You can catch me on the Byteball Slack or on Telegram.

Cheers, and good luck on your crusade, piney... I'm afraid you'll find all that energy to be wasted.

1: See section 13 in the whitepaper on "commissions". It's divided in 2 and goes to witnesses and the wallet referencing the unit. If the system is made fee-less, some other mechanism to prevent spam would be needed which could be PoW or pos or some combination/delegation.

2: Currently the tps rate rarely exceeds 2. Previous stress test showed capacity around 15. In other words, there's plenty of room to grow before current limitation to tps (unoptimized SQL) needs to be addressed. Tony has said that several things can be optimized to increase tps it that it doesn t really make sense to spend time on that at the moment.  The speed of the DAG is determined by full nodes' ability to process new units. For the time being, it just doesn't make sense to spend time on that, though.

As we enter the third week of the Steem Use-a-Thon, new use cases were proposed and detailed reports on the progress of others where published.

The weekly update has just been published and once again I'm super excited to see the creativity and enthusiasm at display.

Check out the post here

Should you want to enter the contest, there's still plenty of time to propose your use case and start work on the realization of it. See instructions on how to join in the announcement of the Use-a-Thon

Which exchange are you looking at? There's no 2k GB sell wall on bittrex.

You're just a grumpy guy and your bitterness is thankfully getting obvious enough for everyone to see through.

Have a nice weekend, nonetheless :-)

The second weekly update on the Steem Use-a-Thon has just been released.

Apart from the Use-a-Thon updates, all weekly newsletters are now also published on Steem.

Furthermore - our area representatives from China, Korea and Venezuela will translate and publish the newsletters and weekly updates on the Use-a-Thon, allowing even more to follow progress and keep up to date on recent development, news and use case development.

Use-a-Thon - Announcement of the Steem Edition
Use-a-Thon - Weekly Update 1
Use-a-Thon - Weekly Update 2

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 :-)

After the Steem airdrop, we announced a Use-a-Thon - Steem Edition.

Those not familiar with the Use-a-Thon format can check out the first edition we held in cooperation with a university in Venezuela.

The contest in discovering, creating and building use cases involving the Byteball Platform runs for 4 weeks until Sunday 30th September. During these 4 weeks, contestants are encouraged to post weekly updates on their progress with their projects, allowing everyone else to see and support their work.

Each week, a Jury will select the best/most interesting progress report that will be rewarded a 1 GB prize.

At the end of the Use-a-Thon, the winners will be announced, and the prized paid to those who actually worked on providing actual use cases for the platform.

A quick overview of some of the use cases actively being worked on by participants:

• A service allowing an alternative way to sell Steem votes bound to conditions on Byteball Smart Contracts
• A Bytes <-> STEEM exchange service
• A solution providing trustless outsourcing and rewarding of tasks between project owners and developers on GitHub/GitLab through use of Smart Contracts
• A freelance platform where projects and freelancers are brought together without insane fees that existing platforms take

Apart from these four use cases, there are 3 more contestants who haven't yet posted an update. More contestants are expected to join during the next week or two, and we're absolutely thrilled to see what the following weeks have in store for us!

Today, the first weekly update was published an the weekly winner of the 1 GB award was determined

First weekly update of the Byteball Use-a-Thon Steem Edition has just been published.

Head over to the official Byteball.org Steem user's blog and if you've got a Steem user yourself, consider following for latest information, weekly newsletters in general and of course to follow the progress of the Use-a-Thon that ends on September 30th.

There's also a Wiki page dedicated to the Use-a-Thon with list of participants enrolled so far and their blogs, allowing everyone to follow the contest as it progresses.

As far as I have seen, issuing a NEP5 token requires developers and a rather hefty downpayment of 500 GAS. That's doesn't seem like a very good alternative. Stellar would probably be a better alternative than NEO. However, neither NEO or Stellar would offer Byteball's built-in KYC features, accredited investor attestations allowing legally and fully compliant issuing of unregistered securities not to mention the built-in feature allowing investors to buy the token directly using Visa/Mastercard. All of these features is usually something the token issuer have to sort out on his own, and most is both incredibly time consuming and rather expensive too. With Byteball - that comes out of the box. For free!

For widespread adoption to non-crypto people, trading on an exchange is definitely not the way to go, agreed.
But with the in-wallet "Buy bytes with Visa/MasterCard"-bot that's exactly what is being addressed. Instead of having users jump through a million hoops to acquire Bytes, they can simply flash their credit card directly within the wallet and purchase Bytes. If that's not directly addressing the issue you raise, I don't know what would be.

The one missing link to complete the value chain is fiat off-ramps allowing merchants to instantly convert Bytes to their respective fiat that they need for operation costs and stock. While it's not integrated in a bot or fully automated yet, initiatives like the Capybara Exchange in Venezuela does a great job in providing a relatively easy off-ramp. A second similar off-ramp is under way in Nigeria too.

There are projects in top-100 that are completely abandoned. No developers, no activity, no innovation, no adoption, nothing. Only speculation. People could just as well speculate in tulips or small bags of gravel. I would be hesitant to use position on Coinmarketcap for anything remotely related to adoption and widespread use.

Agreed - that's exactly what the in-wallet integration with Visa/MasterCard provides in terms of buying. Selling is a bit more tricky, but it's definitely on the radar as something that has to be solved. Only by providing a solution covering the full value chain all the way from customer to merchants and potentially to manufacturers will a coin have the potential to disrupt the market for commerce. Need I remind people, that the overarching goal of Byteball, is to become the preferred platform for commerce? Yet - progress is slow and often intertwined with loads of legal stuff, negotiations dragging on for ages as well as finding potential entry points in existing markets.

Indeed - fortunately Byteball isn't the only participant in that prayer.

Here I must disagree. There has been a quite significant change of "regulars" in the community. But my own personal view on that is, that it proved the point of changing focus on airdrops was the right decision. Previous "regulars" stuck around until the stream of free money stopped and immediately left. If they had been involved in actual projects aiming to promote the platform or in other ways had started actively engaging in the project, they wouldn't have left. There are a few old-timers still left, but if you take a quick look on activity on Slack, it's quite obvious that those left are those who have actively taken a stance and decided to not just sit back and wait to get rich and watch others do all the work.

What a lot of people fail to understand is, that it takes so little effort to actively make a difference. So it's mindblowingly stupid that investors spending time writing long whiny posts here, on Slack or anywhere else, doesn't instead spend that time actively doing something productive. I can't imagine how unsatisfying it must be to just be sitting on one's ass just pointing out things that has to be done, preferably yesterday.

Even the smallest effort does make a difference. I know everyone on the core team is running 120% to keep the pace of the development of this project. We should be thankful for that and provide whatever help we can to make even more things happen.

Just my 2 cents - now back to doing actual work for the project ;-)

This has absolutely nothing to do with politics and proposing it has is ridiculous. Any decent spam filter seeing 5000+ almost identical emails from one sender to recipients on one domain would be triggered, causing a blacklisting.

As to why the IT department has chosen not to remove Byteball.org from the servers blacklist, I would have to refer you to the Student Council (FCEUSB) who together with the dean's secretary met with representatives of the IT department. They will be able to explain the reason for their request of having usb.ve domain removed from the email attestation bot's white list of domains eligible for rewards.

As already stated, Byteball has absolutely no intentions of causing any harm or problems to neither individuals or systems.

!!!ATTENTION - STUDENTS AT USB!!!

After the byteball.org domain was blacklisted by the mailserver at Universidad Simòn Bolìvar, there has been a meeting with representatives from FCEUSB, the university management and the IT department.

Due to unfortunate events, we have been asked to remove the usb.ve domain from the white list of the email attestation bot.

It will no longer be possible to receive attestation rewards or referral rewards for email-accounts on the usb.ve domain.
We are truly sorry about it, but Byteball cannot risk causing any harm to individuals or IT-systems.
The whitelisting has been removed now as requested by University officials.

Any questions regarding this can be directed to FCEUSB.

This does not in any way affect the Use-a-Thon

Just to let you know. Collecting cristals actually do work. But only 1 cristal. If you try to collect a second one, it doesn't count it. Shut down app, wait for a while. Fire up the game again, and you can collect the next cristal. Could it be there's an issue with having to wait for blockchain transactions to confirm or something like that? Also, it would seem that it would be way smoother using Byteball - particularly when they will be supporting payment channels in a short amount of time. This will make it possible to fire hundreds of transactions extremely fast without paying fees or touching the DAG until the payment channel closes. It would seem that would be the better option, I think.

The distribution to the Venezuelan university comes in two steps.

The initial idea was to host a Use-a-Thon, where students can enter a contest with prizes in bytes worth about $800 - which is comparatively much money to any student. Arranging such contest had the implication, that contestants would need bytes to experiment with transfers etc. so Tony suggested their domain was added to the white list of the email attestation bot, allowing all students to claim the $10 worth of bytes as reward.

The word spread like wild-fire and people were all over the place offering to pay other students to attest their email to get the referral reward (also worth $10) and that resulted in a complete craze. We had more than than 4000 attestations from students at the university.

What I believe is the best thing about this is, that while some will of course sell it as soon as they get it, others might hold on for a while. This allows the projects of the Use-a-Thon to materialize which suddenly makes their bytes spendable in actual use cases developed by the participants of the Use-a-Thon.

I've seen the suggestions about expanding the concept to other universities in developing countries where the $10 is comparatively worth more than ie. the US or EU. And this has been the plan right from the get go of this initiative.

At the moment, we're gathering information and experience from this first edition of the Byteball Use-a-Thon, which is definitely needed in order to expand to more universities. We encounter problems and questions on a daily basis, that we hadn't thought of, and some of the events at the university couldn't possibly have been foreseen. We also quickly came to the conclusion, that in order for the initiative to have more effect, it would be a smart move to also reward a team of documentarists. During the period of the Use-a-Thon, they will take pictures, do short interviews and/or video clips that will help us build the case when presenting it to other universities.

We also currently ran into the problem, that the university's mail server actually blacklisted the byteball.org domain (any decent spam filter would probably consider thousands of almost identical emails sent from the same address in a few days a text-book example of spam) so we had to get contacts from the Student Council and the on-site coordinating professor meet with the IT department of the university to explain the reason for this.

All in all, there's simply just SO many things, that we discover and learn from doing this, that it wouldn't be plausible to host multiple contests at this point in time. I wouldn't be exaggerating if I say that me and the two other organizers spend somewhere between 3 and 4 hours a day, sorting out issues, having correspondence with university representatives and making needed decisions on things we hadn't thought of before the contest was announced.

My long term dream is to run a series of contests at several universities in a broad range of developing countries. Then - have a huge inter-university contest, where all winning teams will compete against winning teams from other universities in one major Use-a-Thon. That one should of course have a massive prize pool, and preferably include some kind of event, where participants are invited to attend some kind of event where winners will be announced. All contestants would have their travel and living expenses covered. But this is a long term dream, and at this point in time, not feasible. But who knows what the future will bring

As soon as we start receiving material from the documentary team at the Universidad Simòn Bolìvar, we will start publishing articles and news on the progress, so stay tuned, and if possible, lend a helping hand with whatever the students might request help with. There's plenty to do, and I must say, that being able to directly affect the adoption of the Byteball project is really amazing! This is only possible with smaller projects like Byteball before they grow too big. Had this been an Ethereum-effort, it would simply be a drop in the ocean. I therefore highly encourage everyone to contribute and come up with cool ideas. The Byteball Grants program is open for everyone with great ideas. So get started!

Cheers!
Punqtured

I fail to see the reason of some people's concern.

Funds are still distributed for free. Past has shown that target group of previous airdrops just dumps it. It's a natural choice to switch strategy.

I really love this quote:
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

Holy cow (no pun intended) that's one hilarious post!

Amen to everything said

And to be frank, airdropping new bytes to existing holders only brings new users in on a very limited scale. I think the recent hand-outs at large events is a way more effective way to raise awareness of the Byteball project. This project really needs organic growth in acceptance and real world applications rather than hyped up marketing and hot air.