Use-a-thon/botwar

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The Great Byteball Bot War

We invite developers to create Chat Bots for the Byteball platform in a contest to build the most awesome, useful, innovative and creative chat bot. The best ideas will be rewarded generously.

Contest format

Over a 4 week period, developers battle in the fine art of coding chat bots. There will be weekly reviews of each contestant’s progress (if the contestant share it) and a weekly award will be granted to the bot creator that provides the best, funniest or most engaging article, blog-post or video.

Prizes

Main prizes

• 1st place: USD 1000 in Bytes (approx 25-35 GB)
• 2nd place: USD 500 in Bytes
• 3rd place: USD 250 in Bytes

Weekly prizes

Each Sunday, the jury will pick the best, most interesting, most informative, funniest or most engaging article, blog post or YouTube video showing the past week’s progress. The best will be awarded $50 worth of Bytes, sent to the dev's registered address. Developers must provide a link to a publicly visible blog, article or other medium by Friday 20:00 CET (19:00 UTC). Participants and links to progress reports will be kept updated on this Byteball Wiki page.

Schedule

Wednesday December 12: Announcement of contest and official start

• Friday December 21, 20.00 UTC: Deadline first weekly progress reports
• Sunday December 23: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award
• Friday December 28, 20.00 UTC: Deadline second weekly progress reports
• Sunday December 30: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award
• Friday January 4, 20.00 UTC: Deadline third weekly progress reports
• Sunday January 6: Announcement of weekly winner of 2 GB award

Friday January 11, 23:59:59 UTC: Deadline for all contest entries

Rules and requirements

1. Each contestant must fill out this form to enter the contest.
2. All code must be published under MIT license on GitHub.
3. The bot must apply at least one DAG feature (e.g. payments, storage, attestation etc.)

Weekly progress reports must be submitted to the jury by Friday to be eligible to win the weekly progress award announced on Sunday. Progress reports can be articles, blog posts, videos or similar must be publicly accessible. Submit your report using this form.

All chat bots are welcome in the competition. Whether it’s a revenue-generating use case, an interface to an external resource or whatever you can think of - it’s fair game.

Evaluation and jury

The jury will consist of:

• Byteball User Acquisition Manager Casper Niebe (@Punqtured)
• Byteball Core Developer Evgenii Stulnikov (@xjenek)
• Byteball Veteran @Slackjore.

The mix of core staff, developers and users helps us evaluate each entry from different perspectives. This means that a brilliant technically-excellent bot with flawless code but no actual real world use would not necessarily have an advantage against a clumsily coded, semi-buggy bot that aims to solve an actual problem or make something easier for Byteball users. Bots should always aim to:

• Solve a real world problem
• Reduce friction in a process
• Have a clear and easily-understood purpose
• Add something new and interesting to the Byteball ecosystem
• Be able to run sustainably without huge costs for the operator.

Useful help and resources

Byteball is easy to develop for. The main scripting language is Node.js, which can be run on both backend and frontend. Any other language works as well by connecting through the easy RPC API.

Don’t have any experience with the Byteball platform or developing Chat Bots for it? Don’t panic - there’s plenty of help and inspiration to get! An excellent place to get started is our new developer website: https://developer.byteball.org.

Some sections you may find useful are Writing chatbots, Issuing assets and Smart contract definitions.

The developer site documents multiple APIs that you may want to explore, has guides and tutorials showcasing Byteball’s most interesting features. Our GitHub has loads of source code of existing bots working in production that you may also want to use in your apps.

If you have coding skills but lack ideas, drop by the Byteball Telegram, Slack or Subreddit to see if other users have an interesting idea. You might also be able to find inspiration from one of the previous Use-a-Thons that Byteball hosted. The most recent was for the Steem community.

On Telegram, we have a dedicated developer’s group as well. You are also encouraged to join the Byteball Slack where you can exchange experience with other developers and the core team. Please state in your request, that you’re a participant in the contest. Finally, the Byteball Subreddit is also an excellent place for inspiration, pitching ideas, getting feedback or simply sharing your thoughts.

Get your bot listed in the Byteball Bot Store

Byteball has a fully featured official wallet which contains a Bot Store where you can list your apps. The Bot Store is a prominent part of the wallet, meaning users can easily find your app.

With e.g. Ethereum, marketing your app is difficult and expensive. If users don’t find your app, its chance of success is remote. One reason Android and Apple apps have become so popular is because the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store connect users to developers’ apps. This is the way Byteball has chosen, too.

Known participants

• List derived from each publicly-attested source of entry fee payment as above.
• Look up username at byteball.co, for example https://byteball.co/@2EVEJTQWQGP3IGPVG24D7AP732TUN6N4/attestations
• Notes includes links to blog Use-a-Thon posts, and also winners of the 1 GB weekly prizes (Sept 2, 9, 16, 23)

User/Link to blog	Registered address/Link to entry fee	Notes
...	...	... blog post #1]

Improper entries

These appear to be attempted entries, but aren't (yet) valid: ...

Weekly Updates on Byteball.org's blog

...

Final winners

• 1st Prize: ...
• 2nd Prize: ...
• 3rd Prize: ...
• Honourable Mention(s): ...

Links

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