Global Sports Betting, according to the dailymail.co.uk, is very likely a 3 Trillion Dollar industry, with a figure of 1 Trillion being a conservative estimate in 2015 alone, with the Asian market being the biggest sport betting market driver.
Furthermore 65% of Sports Betting is attributed to American Football, with up to 1 Billion Euros being gambled on a single game. Today marks a turning point for the Steemit.com blockchain based social media platform where a unique Sports Vote Betting phenomenon is being launched to aid the community through Mass Distribution of Steem Power!
which is also my original Steemit account. I joined Steemit in the early beta stages before payouts became live and I now post for crypto-news publishers on Steemit. I also founded the 
billboard initiative, the purpose of which is to crowdfund “big ticket” and high impact outdoor media to help place Steemit on the proverbial map.
I am proud to announce my newest project, SteemSports - Ultimate Vote Betting!
Why not take advantage of a 3 Trillion Dollar industry and bring some of its users to Steemit, and at the same time help the community.
Unlike traditional Sports Betting, no money will be required to take part in SteemSports, the power of the Steem blockchain is that the blockchain produces a daily pool of funds, the community then votes on content they deem worthy and in doing so are voting to allocate a portion of the daily pool rewards to that content, the more personal Steem Power the voter has, the more influence the voter will have on the allocation of the funds.
Just as Steemit is an unconventional social media platform, so is SteemSports innovating in the realm of Sports Betting with its coined phrase “Vote Betting”, which refers to the unique mechanics of how it will differ to ordinary stake casting.
How it Works
Participants will vote on the main post as an entrance fee (The main post rewards get added to the total bet pool).
Thereafter there will be two or more comments to vote on, each will represent a player, a team, an event or an outcome. The participant must cast a vote on ONLY ONE comment which he/she wishes to bet on winning the odds.
After 24 hours the post and related game comments will in current conditions, pay out 50% liquid Steem Dollars after the 25% voters rewards are deducted from the main post value.
30% of the resultant payout will be retained by the account, of which 15% will go to the writer/sports presenter of the post, and the 15% balance towards editing, development and advertising.
70% of the liquid payout will be converted to Steem over 7 days, using the internal conversion mechanism and held in trust until the future outcome is determined.
Once the event comes to pass and the winning outcome determined, we will execute a proprietary developed script that will divide and pay out the Steem rewards equally, using the Power Up method, to mass distribute SP to all participants that voted on the main post as the entrance fee as well as voted on the correct comment representing the winning outcome.
Only participants with a Reputation of 35 or more will earn rewards, but non-qualifiers can still vote in support of the redistribution initiative.
We just ran a test of our proprietary script prior to the launch of this campaign and as you can see from the below screenshot and this wallet link http://steemit.com/@steemsports/transfers it has paid out evenly to all voters who heavily voted on a previous comment made on the 
How will SteemSports improve and Grow the Steemit Community?
The Sports Betting user-base market capture, is itself a strong motivator for community support of SteemSports, however
Economic inequality between users
Currently there are valiant efforts underway by curator initiatives such as 
Upon distribution of winnings, all winning entrants will receive an equal share of the Steem pool, paid out in the form of a Steem Power-up! In minutes, hundreds, if not thousands of winning voters will receive SP in their wallets to aid them on their Steemit journey to be able to upvote other writers and friends and participate in the community.
Some whales may not wish to receive rewards for themselves to help equalize the community, and would like to vote only to increase the Stake Pool and not receive SP; in such a case they are easily able to vote the main post, and disqualify themselves by voting multiple comment outcomes. I do however recommend at least for the first post that whales do participate and join in the fun of trying to predict the outcome along with the community.
Gamification
There has been an interest from Steemit, Inc in increasing the gamification of the platform, SteemSports answers that call. Not only is it a game itself for users to participate in by voting, but it requires further gamification prior, by leveling up ones Reputation to at least 35 to be eligible for a payout of the winnings Stake Pool. This may be increased to 40 in time or as per recommendation by the community.
Many other gamification spin-offs may occur as a result of this initiative; our script is currently proprietary but once we have fine-tuned and tested it extensively, we will most likely create a web front-end whereby users can activate the script for their own content and distribute payouts to their supporters for a small % transaction fee. Furthermore, possible licensed integrations with steempay.io and Blocktrades could be negotiated. (In the meantime I can run the scripts manually for you if you contact me in chat with a non-competing gaming idea, steemit.chat).
Job creation and Alternate income streams
As with the
As the games become widely popular, we may even see cameo appearances of well-known sports commentators and sports stars who may join Steemit to take part in presenting SteemSports.
Supporting the Steem Dollar Peg
In a recent post, Steemit co-founder 
SteemSports will utilize the recommend method of internally converting Steem Dollar to Steem via the 7 day average, allowing witness feeds to adjust the conversion as close to 1:1 as possible.
Furthermore, since only 30% of the total payout will go the content writer, editor and account retention fund, 70% of the SBD will be taken out of circulation via the conversion and Power-Up, thereby limiting supply of SBD in the market, thus helping support the peg.
Economic Support
Eventually once the inequality “playing field” has been levelled acceptably, the games can be switched to rshares mode, which reward users in accordance to their SP holdings and vote weight percentage cast on the vote. This will incentivise users to purchase Steem and Power-Up further as a result, to enhance their stake pool winnings, but for now however we will run in equal distribution mode to help the community.
We will take our queue from the community and Steemit, Inc on suggestions on how to best help the economy, if SBD payout becomes preferable later on, we can adjust the script or even to a hybrid SBD/SP or Steem payout depending on what market liquidity is required.
Steem Price Improvement
Currently the top grossing users, known as Steem Whales, are powering down, partially in an attempt to provide liquidity to the market so new users can buy into Steem at a low rate and “Power Up”, while decreasing their own SP holdings to try equalize the market and slowly bring themselves down from their position of high inequality.
The Powered-Up Steem will have the effect of reducing supply in the liquid market and may help drive the price up.
Furthermore, potential external investors will see the versatility of the Steem blockchain platform and be more likely to fund further development and initiatives, as an example, we would be open for investment to develop our steemsports.com domain into a fully-fledged sports specific portal, connected to the Steem blockchain, I believe via RPC function calls.
Multi-country and muti-language support will also be key for mass user adoption of SteemSports and the underlying Steem blockchain.
Marketing
Steemsports.com may just be the “silver bullet” needed for mass user adoption of Steemit; as not all users wish to be bloggers or even read content and may prefer to ‘play’.
SteemSports will tap into the sports communities through its unique offering of Sports Betting without the requirement of putting down any direct monetary stakes, and still winning voters’ rewards for voting early on the post even if they don’t pick the winning outcome.
The games also acts as a form of pseudo-affiliate referral system, incentivizing participants to make use of the new “REPOST” button and their existing Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn social media accounts to attract other voters to increase the Stake Pool.
It is beneficial to attract voters with SP holdings higher than one’s own, as well as new users with low reputation to join up and vote.
The Reputation requirement is tailored to stop spam accounts from being created to take part, but still incentivise users to use SteemSports as a 'honeypot' to attract new referrals to experience the fun and excitement, the new users will vote and increase the payout, activity and visibility of the post, but not necessarily be paid out themselves until they have enough reputation for future games, which they soon will be motivated to participate positively in order to gain the necessary reputation to earn by winning on Steemsports.
Curation
The
Summary
A new concept of Sports Vote Betting has been born, due to the versatility of the Steem blockchain platform. Steemsports.com will become a provably fair method of betting with no risk and only rewards; the initiative can be used to bet on any outcome much like the Augur Prediction Market, but without the pay-in.
Steemsports.com could easily become the much needed nicotine patch for gaming addicts to continue enjoying gambling with no detrimental personal financial implications while still enjoying their favourite past time. Any money spent on Powering Up, will remain in the user’s account regardless of how much the user votes and will remain as a form of redeemable shares in the platform with a market value and in-platform utility.
Sincerely,
Support SteemSports Ultimate Vote Betting … together we all can win!
CLICK THIS LINK OR IMAGE TO PLAY THE FIRST STEEMSPORTS GAME!!
Disclaimer:
Images used in this post are either paid for and modified or are Creative Commons (CC).
Please vote responsibly :).
Copyright © Ricardo Goncalves 2016
