Entering the 3rd week of the contest, we have seen how initial ideas can prove to be more difficult to realize than first anticipated. And one of the most important things in this Use-a-Thon is the contestants’ work on the realization of their ideas and use cases. Only through experimenting, failing, adjusting and new experimenting will you be able to develop feasible and sustainable results.
Ever had an idea fail?
Ideas are what this contest is essentially all about. Creative thinking can lead to a multitude of exciting experiments and valuable experiences, enabling you to produce even better ideas. There’s this wonderful quote going:
To halve your time to success, double the rate at which you fail
-Thomas J. Watson
Knowing that failure is inevitable when exploring new grounds, failures or realizing things were not how you thought it to be, really should be celebrated! Look at how many times a child falls over before finally learning to walk. The road to success is long and littered with failures. Refusing to accept failure would be forfeiting your chance of ever reaching success.
There is still plenty of time for new contestants to join and fail, so please check out the announcement of the contest for instructions on how to join.
Create your own ecosystem on Byteball
As already hinted in the 2nd weekly update, the Byteball platform offers a unique possibility to create isolated ecosystems using tokens. Any user can easily issue their own token to be used for whatever they desire. The process is quick, simple and doesn’t even require any programming skills at all. On Ethereum, you have to learn the Solidity language to issue a smart contract. That’s not the case on the Byteball platform.
Anyone can create a token through the Byteball Market website and the in-wallet Byteball Market Bot. Even without prior knowledge, you would be able to issue a new token in 15-20 minutes and the cost is only 5 MB which is roughly USD $0.30.
But wouldn’t a new token be worthless, you might ask? Well - that definitely depends on how you are going to use it. Shops can use it for loyalty points, allowing discounts in return for points. Sports clubs could use it to keep track of time spent training. Some might even have their token represent a product or service that users can exchange it for.
In the early days of monetary systems, any scarce resource could be used for trading goods and several assets that are considered valuable today started off as merely collectibles of little or no value.
In last week’s update we already talked a bit about the Textcoin feature, a convenient way to distribute tokens even to users that don’t have a Byteball wallet yet.
Summary of this week's blog posts
I think it’s fair to say that to some of our contestants, the past week proved both challenging but also rewarding. Mainly in terms of acquiring important experience and identifying potential weak spots in their use cases. A total of 7 updates on use cases were posted, and as always, it has been super exciting to get to experience the contestants’ work first hand.
For his third consecutive update, @drsensor came to the realization that while the idea is definitely still plausible, the realization of it proved far more complex than initially anticipated. His idea to create the means to unite contributors and project owners from Github on a single platform is, beyond any doubt, brilliant. And there is no doubt to the jury that he possesses all the skills required to pull it off. But during this week, it became painstakingly obvious that the project was indeed huge. In the true spirit of open source, @drsensor provided the idea, direction and architecture for possible implementation in his weekly update, allowing others to contribute or take over.
With a staggering 3 different use cases brewing, @genievot has definitely taken a head-first dive into this contest. The first use case is to create a freelancing platform. It seems that he spotted the same potential problem as @drsensor for this use case. During the past week there hasn’t been any posted progress on this project.
The second use case in the making is a voting app, allowing Byteball users to create polls and vote. While such a feature already exists on the Byteball.co website, this project would provide a better UI/UX than the current one.
The third use case seems to be a project that is really taking off: The realization of a Discord bot that allows a wide range of features to be accessed from a Discord server. The initial proof of concept has long since been conducted, and new features are being added at a mind-boggling pace. What we found truly inspiring is the way he manages to describe how implementation of one feature immediately sparks an idea for more features.
This week’s update consists of two separate updates. The update to the concept of having people donate to be able to plant trees has moved on to propose acquiring 200 ambassadors from 200 different cities to help realize the project.
The second use case, the Ask Steemit Anything project, seems to have been confused with the Plant a Tree project so we couldn’t really make any proper assessment on the progress of the Ask Steemit Anything case.
While there was no update on the use case of applying the use of smart contracts to provide trustless purchase and transfer of domain names between users, @altcoinb has come up with a new use case: An SMS bot. While acknowledging that SMS is an old service compared to modern chat apps, there is still a vast number of messages being sent using the Short Message System. By exploiting this fact, the proposed use case describes a possible bot to be added to the Bot Store, allowing users to send SMS messages. The bot would connect to a service provider’s API to deliver the messages sent from wallets. Simple, clean and probably a fairly straightforward implementation too.
Having further explored his use case about introducing Bytes as a means of payment with merchants in Venezuela, @malos10 this week took his use case to the streets. After he revised the initial plan, it was time to find a way to prove the feasibility and sustainability of the project and this hits the very core of what the Use-a-Thon is about. Exploring, testing, improving and adjusting until you eventually end up successful. With an elaborate update describing the process, readers were invited to take part in his determination to succeed.
This week's winner of 1 GB
As is luckily getting to be a wonderful habit, the jury really had a hard time determining who should be awarded the weekly 1 GB for best progress. With four different people judging all your reports, it’s only natural to have very different views and personal taste. But at the end, we came to an agreement, and this week’s winner is…
The Byteball team congratulates all of our contestants for yet another super interesting week and wish everyone an equally exciting and productive week to come. Should you want to participate, it’s not too late. All it requires is an interesting idea, 25 MB for the entry fee that must be paid from a wallet with a publicly attested Steem user.
To meet our contestants, the Byteball staff and stay up to date, make sure to join the Byteball Slack and subscribe to our weekly newsletter!
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.
Steem Use-a-Thon by Byteball - Weekly Update 3 | Ecency
@drsensor
@genievot 
@chrisaiki 
@altcoinb 
@malos10 