Connect your GitHub account and claim your rewards by simply clicking a button.
If you haven't: read the introduction post.
For GitHub users it was already possible to earn rewards without a Steem account. Now they can use their earned rewards to purchase an account directly on merge-rewards.com. As soon as their balance is enough to pay the fee, they are offered to create an account. It uses the blocktrades API so there are some fees. I also add 2 SBD on top of the price that blocktrades charges. Blocktrades addes this as STEEM to the account, which is then automatically powered up during the account creation process on merge-rewards.com. The account test123456789 is the latest living example that it works. ;)
So there's one more service built on the Steem blockchain that doesn't force people to get an account before they can use it. I think that's quite cool and the GitHub community is big. So hopefully this turns out to become an efficient way of onboarding new people, especially developers, to the Steem platform.
You can now purchase Boosters via PayPal. Booster are consumable items you can use to increase a score. You can also send those boosters to any GitHub account and on the frontpage I'll add an option for anyone to buy boosters directly for other users without even connecting to GitHub. The recipient doesn't even need to know about merge-rewards.com. As soon as they connect to the website with their GitHub for the first time, they have their boosters available.
In a future update I will remove the possibility to buy boosters for yourself. It will only be possible to buy boosters for other GitHub users.
But ATTENTION: All of this is still experimental and there's no guarantee that boosters you buy now won't be reset at some point. This SHOULD not happen but for now think of this as a form of supporting this project. Currently the boosters are much more expensive than what they bring you. The prices are also very likely to change. The current prices are actually just right from testing it without much further thought. I think I will simply bind them to the current vote value of the 
I implemented PayPal first because this project also needs some direct fiat revenue streams. I'm pretty sure that I'll implement crypto payments as well but for now it's just PayPal. By the way, I heard from specific sources that PayPal doesn't like cryptocurrency related projects so much so let's see how long this works at all. ;)
In general I would love some more gamificataion features. Some Ideas are already evolving...
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I used simple json files to store data, like claims and withdrawals. To be a liiittle bit more scaleable I migrated everything to a proper relational database. I chose MySQL simply because my hoster had MySQL database already set up for me. But i think for now it's only important to have something that can handle more than one write transaction at a time. :D
I will not mention everything in detail here but just for the record: There are also several bug fixes and improvements hidden in all the commits from the last 7 days..
Definitely the bounties! It needs to be easy for people to add crypto AND/OR fiat to an issue bounty. I have several ideas how to implement this. But it will need some time.
After that it will be time to do some polishing, design- and code-wise. I'm still in rapid prototyping mode so here and there you might find some technical debt. I think as soon as bounties are implemented this project has an extent where it makes sense to consolidate and tighten everything together.
There are also still issues like the missing consideration of Resource Credits and the need for some sort of queuing comments to not touch the posting limitations or automatic conversion of STEEM to SBD, actually quite important stuff.
Well, my ideas for this are really numerous and I will not be bored for some time, that's for sure. But... What are YOUR ideas?
I really hope for a growing userbase in the coming weeks and therefore for more feedback and hopefully also first contributions to the code. I really want this to be a community project and in the end I am trying to onboard developers with this. Utopian is now paused for a few weeks it said. So the planned Utopian integration will need to wait a bit I guess. It's a little bit sad but I also know that it's the right step for Utopian and they will hopefully come back stronger. I was involved in Utopian in the very beginning as moderator and development category manager and I had the best time of my professional life.
On the other hand I must admit that this situation gives Merge Rewards the chance to get some attention. While we are waiting for Utopian to come back on it's feet, let's develop something that might give them some inspiration. :P I would love to have the Utopian integration in the end and to cooperate in one way or the other.
By the way: To have more to test with, pull requests of the last 90 (instead of 14) days can be claimed at the moment.
I think this project has a proper mechanic to grow it's SP on it's own, by letting GitHub users "use" the 
