Byteball Use-a-Thon: Vote Selling

Byteball has started a new contest that sounds like loads of fun! You can read all about it here: Announcing the Steem Use-a-Thon by Byteball

Contest Entry Use Case

Basically a way of purchasing a vote from a holder of Steem Power using Bytes. Using a smart contract powered by a chat bot in the Byteball wallet a person could sell their votes. For example, a Steemit user could offer a 100 percent up-vote given at 90 percent or above voting power for a user doing a certain type of post on Steemit within a time period of say 24 hours.

Post types that qualify for example, could be:

• Original macro photography of insects
• Original story or poem
• Original pictures of trash the user has cleaned up
• Whatever the Steemit user is willing to pay for

The Steemit user could create the contract with a minimum amount they are willing to sell their vote for in Bytes or basically offer the vote for free, or to the highest bidder.

Steemit users buying votes send payments in Bytes to the seller with a link to their post. The seller checks the link and optionally votes for it within the initial time period.

The contract waits for the seven day time period until the voting period ends and pays the voter (seller) in Bytes if they have voted on a link given by a buyer. It then returns any Bytes paid out by vote buyers that did not get a vote.

Current Progress

I thinking about trying to get some chat bot code running on my spare machine and seeing if there are any oracles around that could help verify that votes were cast on Steemit posts. Frankly, it could be more of a project than I am up for with my limited javascript skills.

Justification

As the value of Steem increases, the value of votes by high Steem Power holders will become more valuable. Selling these votes for Bytes should grow the demand for Bytes and encourage holding Steem for investment.

New users often have trouble getting started and increasingly use bid bots to get some return for posts.

Running any kind of voting service that takes SBD in payment very quickly becomes difficult for Steem holders unless automated. However, current automated bid bots make no decisions about the quality of posts they vote for and they way this is done currently does not really help curate good content imho.

At one point I experienced many problems with people sending me SBD and links to posts they wanted me to upvote. At first this was welcomed but there were so many requests that I could not possibly make it very fair for everyone. Having to vote for content just because someone sent you a payment that you did not request becomes difficult - many of the posts were good but having to spend a lot of time looking at posts that don’t particularly interest you can detract from spending time looking at posts that you do value.

Having greater control over the vote buying process could be a win-win situation for both people buying and selling votes, promote better content and improve the value of Steem and Bytes.

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