
It’s been a full month of pure excitement, inspiring creativity, surprising innovation and a great level of activity. But this Sunday, the deadline was reached for the second edition of the Byteball Use-a-Thon.
On behalf of the entire Byteball team and community, I would like to thank everyone who participated and shared their ideas and entrepreneurship with everyone else. You’re all freaking amazing!

While this is usually where we take a look at a specific feature available on the Byteball platform, we have to skip that for today’s announcement. Instead, it will allow us to introduce you to all the projects and use cases that were entered during the contest period.
Besides a brief description of the proposed use case, there is a short section with some thoughts of the jury members or advice on how to proceed with realization after the Use-a-Thon contest. The jury consist of four veteran Byteball users with very different backgrounds and preferences. This led to interesting debates on use cases, and it is important to stress that apart from deciding on the winners the jury members did not necessarily agree on all the details. As the article is written by @punqtured, so is the “Jury comments” section of each use case.
With that sorted, brace yourself for a lengthy but hopefully super exciting article! Let’s dive right in and take a look at the use cases in the order the contestants joined the contest.
@LIGHTSPLASHER

By introducing a Byteball Smart Contract-driven way to buy votes on Steem, the project aims to solve a problem that gets increasingly difficult when done manually. A user would create a Smart Contract and request a specific type of post to be made in return for the vote. It could be specific photographs or articles on specific topics. If the poster doesn’t claim the reward within a certain amount of time, the amount offered on the Smart Contract would be returned to the user making the offer.
Jury comments
While the idea is definitely possible, there seem to be already automated bots and platforms on Steem making this possible. Assessing the feasibility, it would seem that while it’s definitely possible to create such a Bot on Byteball the benefits would be rather small. It would, however, make it possible to show the user creating the post that the money is on the table - or on the Smart Contract. With existing solutions, a user would have to trust the other party to actually make the payment or cast the vote to be rewarded.
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@GROW-PRO

Even before the Use-a-Thon was announced, an easy exchange between Bytes and STEEM was needed. Only days after the announcement that Byteball would reward all Steem users who linked their username with a Byteball wallet, @grow-pro and his friend @jackmiller had their solution ready. And even beating the in-wallet exchange bot by providing a fee-less exchange between Bytes and STEEM.
Jury comments
The process requires the two contestants to manually keep track of users wanting to make an exchange, which is great for a start but could quickly become a problem or even introduce errors. The use case is highly relevant, and it is obvious to the jury that these contestants were able to pinpoint a problem they could solve. The endless hours of work this must have required is admirable. While the use case doesn’t introduce new uses for the Byteball platform, we acknowledge the ability to spot the problem and provide the fastest possible solution.

@DRSENSOR
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Probably inspired by knowing how valuable contributions to open source projects are, @drsensor introduced the idea of linking Byteball to GitHub. Through the use of a bot and an oracle tapping into the APIs of GitHub, the solution would make it possible for a repository owner to request specific contributions to be made to his project and set specific rewards for them on Smart Contracts. During work on the project, it grew and eventually ended up becoming too large for one man to pull off.
Jury comments
This project uses the core of what the Byteball platform is able to do: eliminate the need for trust between two parties in digital transactions. By elegantly spotting the need for a bot allowing project owners to request specific tasks and an oracle that could provide an unbiased result from the effort of the contributor, this project hits pretty much all the right notes. Most existing platforms either require the contributor to trust the project owner to transfer the reward after he has provided all the work, or introduce an escrow service. The jury believes that this project’s realization would be highly valuable both to project owners as well as contributors, who would potentially be willing to pay a small fee to take advantage of all the benefits. So it is our sincere hope that someone will eventually pick up on the idea and make it happen.

@GENIEVOT
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Use case #1
A freelancing platform. Having spotted basically the same potential as @drsensor did, this project’s aim was a bit more open, providing more or less all the features of existing crowdsourcing platforms but removing the need for trust. By implementing a bot that allows requestor and producer to connect, browse specific categories of job offers and see specific payments for each job, the project takes a more holistic view of freelancing platforms than a specific GitHub integration.
Jury comments
Probably without knowing it, the contestant provided a solution that, when storing the rating score of a contributor on the DAG, would allow 3rd party applications to benefit from this project too. The direct engagement between someone offering a job and a stranger providing the work is a brilliant use case for the trustless exchange of value and information on Byteball.
Use case #2
A voting app or website. While there is an existing voting functionality available on the Byteball platform, this use case aims to introduce a new and improved poll or voting platform. One of the key features would be the possibility to generate a password that users wanting to vote have to know. This would allow for private polls to be conducted.
Jury comments
The existing poll feature can definitely be improved on, and there are a few novel ideas that would be a great addition to the Byteball platform. Apart from the basic idea, there weren’t really any details, making it a bit hard to evaluate. We found the idea to generally be good and highly feasible to implement.
Use case #3
A Byteball Discord bot. Acknowledging that Discord is rapidly growing and that more and more users are becoming aware of Byteball too, it is likely that there would be a need for a Discord bot for Byteball. The features of the bot would allow users to register a wallet with the bot, from which they could then send tips to other users, make payments, pull data from the DAG, present the polls generated in the previous use case and quite a few other useful ideas.
Jury comments
Showing incredible speed in progress and being able to create a working prototype in a matter of days is impressive. Implementing features only a few weeks old also proves an in-depth understanding of the platform. We are absolutely convinced that the Discord bot is an excellent addition that will not only help introduce Byteball to a wider audience but also provide users easy access to features. The possibility to follow the development more or less live on GitHub was a great pleasure as well.
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@CHRISAIKI

Use case #1
Ask Anything. The idea is to allow users to post a question on their Steem blog. If the question is considered good, the person who asked would receive an answer and an upvote. All answers to the post would then be evaluated and rewarded an amount of Bytes. This way, the user asking a question would earn STEEM while the user providing the best answer would receive Bytes. A Win-Win use case.
Jury comments
We had quite a hard time figuring out how the user asking the question would know whether or not the user providing the best answer had made a public attestation with the Steem attestation bot. Without a public attestation, asker wouldn’t know the address of the best answerer. It seemed somewhat forced to bring Byteball into the use case and it would be far easier for the asker to simply send STEEM to the user with the best answer.
Use case #2
Become a tree ambassador and help plant trees by donating Bytes to the project. The collected funds would be sent to a non-profit organisation in Cameroon where they would be used to plant trees for the greater benefit of everyone.
Jury comments
While the cause is definitely a worthy one, the use of Byteball doesn’t really add anything extra to the donation case, and it would be just as easy to use any other currency. We do believe that to avoid fraud, corrupt middle men or organisations running off with donated funds, the application of Smart Contracts could definitely prove to be the future of a lot of charity use cases. Making a donation conditional would require the recipients to meet certain criteria that could be measured by an impartial party. It could be the tree provider acting as a personal oracle, acknowledging that a number of trees had been bought, thereby releasing donated funds to the organisation.
With an impressive determination to realize his use case, @Malos10 set out to prove to his local community that Byteball as a means of payment can be a better alternative than the Venezuelan Bolivar. Through a series of posts throughout the Use-a-Thon, he described his progress and identified the most important barriers to cryptocurrencies becoming widely adopted and used.
The approach was to first study the Byteball platform thoroughly to learn the benefits and the shortcomings. Armed with this highly technical knowledge, he then set out to talk to merchants and explain it to them in ways they could understand and that allowed them to see the potential benefits. Having successfully convinced a number of merchants to test the use of the platform for a week and by providing customers with free Bytes they could use in the shop, @Malos10 effectively took on the role of a skillful puppeteer orchestrating a complex act of commerce. Paying careful attention to all the parties in the value chain from customer to shop to exchange and back to customer, he successfully pulled off the field test.
In the final week, he returned to the shops to interview the owners about their experience with using Byteball to know where the project could be improved.
Jury comments
The amount of work put into this use case is remarkable. The weekly progress reports were inspiring and engaging and made it easy for everyone to follow the progress. The initiative has the potential to make a significant impact on the way people do commerce and provides a solution to a highly relevant problem in Venezuela. We believe that the project makes a great impression, but at the same time also acknowledge, that the use case - at least in its current state of progress - doesn’t require the Byteball platform to be used. It would be possible with basically any cryptocurrency that people would agree on using instead of fiat currency.
A briefly explained concept of providing a random quiz or competition, where users would sign up with a bot and the bot would then issue a question at random intervals. The first user to provide the correct answer would win a reward.
Jury comments
The idea is beautifully simple and probably would be fairly straightforward to implement. It would help keep Byteball in mind with users and could be a fun and engaging way to spread more knowledge about the platform and all its features to both new and existing users. It could also potentially attract new users hoping to be first to answer the questions and win a prize. It’s a prime example of how simple things can sometimes make a real difference.
Like many other Steemians, the idea for the use case started with the attestation reward program. A lot of Steem users suddenly had Bytes, and providing an easy and safe way for users to exchange their Bytes was seen as an opportunity by many. Having successfully created a manual exchange service for Nigerian Steem users, @drumstix went on to explore if there could be further potential to the benefit of everyone. As with many other other African countries, the purchase of utilities like electricity, water, mobile airtime etc. can be done through API integration with utility providers. By enabling Nige