In September 2016, the Steem blockchain witnessed a sporting hype phenomenon of a magnitude that no crypto social community has to date experienced. The Ultimate Free-to-Play sports prediction games, SteemSports!
The premise was that a blog post would represent an upcoming sports match and comments made by the blog account would be generated for the teams in play, users would then vote on the team they predict would win, and then when the rewards payout those who correctly voted the winner would win a share of the combined rewards from the main post as well as the winning and losing teams pools, represented as comments.
The SteemSports games quickly went viral, with hundreds to thousands of voting participants, voting to win and voting for the pile-on curation effect, popularity increased to the point that there were up to 5 games on trending per day. Twelve members of staff were contracted as editors, writers, managers, talk show hosts and more; there seemed no stopping the hype, the free vote participation was enjoyed by all. Some sister brands were formed such as Chessmaster, the Russian Rusteemsports, and many others.
Eventually, SteemSports ceased to function as a prediction market by virtue of being a victim of its own success. Envious whales decided it should no longer be trending, but rather than simply correcting the UI to segregate the content to its own tag group, they decided to simply downvote the rewards on the posts to render the games non-viable. Talk about a #GAMESTOP!
This weekend, SteemSports reboots as BITSPORTS on the Blurt blockchain to bring back the hype, gamesmanship, fun, community spirit, and enjoyment back to the community. Blurt has no downvotes so the games cannot be disrupted, which makes Blurt the perfect platform for rewards-based prediction markets.
So what will be different?
Versatile brand. The name BITSPORTS takes advantage of the bitcoin brand, which is currently going viral across the globe and garnering greater adoption. BITSPORTS is a blockchain neutral name, it can run atop of any Blurt-derived chain such as the hotly anticipated Bling (Cosmos iteration of Blurt).
Greater payouts! Previously, due to the long staking period on Steem, the only game rewards that could be utilised were the liquid rewards, however, BITSPORTS will continually power down rewards and provide a float to ensure max rewards go to the winning pool, less a modest 15% commission and a small provision for transaction fees.
Instead of the winning pool being divided equally to the winners, the new iteration will be stake-weighted, which means that the more Blurt Power you have behind your vote, the greater the share of the winning rewards pool you will win. The aim is to revive the Blurt token market and create utility from gamification.
BONUS rewards! The @blurtmob and @blurtsport curation accounts will add some votes to the mix on select games to increase the winners' pool.
No Frills games put more money in the winners' kitty! Previously SteemSports went to great lengths to avoid the wrath of downvoting, each post had a sportswriter provide a game synopsis, which was first run past an editor who proofed the content for posting, this had a high cost of human resources and meant higher commissions held back. On Bitsports we will simply post the match date, team voting options, and instructions on how to play, keeping things lean and focussing on the game.
Community authors are by all means welcome to piggyback on the bitsports hype and write match prediction posts, player and team stats content etc using the #bitsports tag. You can use the #blurtsport tag as well for an opportunity to be curated by the @blurtsport account.
Win curation rewards regardless of the outcome! On the Blurt blockchain, each time you vote you earn a share of 50% curation pool, this is a standard feature to reward curation of content, by voting for a winning team you automatically share in the curation reward portion of the comment you vote for. The 50% author reward portion will then go towards the winning pool.
Thank you so much to share about you. Great!!
Fantastic. I’m going to have to plug myself back into the Sports World ....
I met
steemin 2018 so I was not part of this project, but I wish luck for the new releaseGo Leafs Go !