How to Do Charity, Prediction Markets, and Gambling in STEEM

Steem is a New Platform And We're All Learning The Rules of The Game. Here I Attempt to Stretch The Usage of The Steem Platform To Include Novel Usecases Such as Charity, Prediction Markets and Gambling..

Flexing The Steem System

Following my first post attempting to exploit self-reference to give a post value, I realized that giving a post value by using the irrationality of individual actors would immediately be overturned by large whales who want content to increase the value of the platform as a whole, and rightly so.

To that end i've come up with three specific methods and use-cases for self-referential posting might add value to the platform as a whole. Not only do each of the use-cases display the efficient and flexible nature of Steem, it also provides unique value for each of the cases.

Charity, Prediction Markets, and Gambling

Charity is a great usecase that will give us more publicity, and reminds me of an idea I had already back on the BitShares forum. I created my first self-referential charity post here, so check it out, and give feedback or propose your own charity post.

Another obvious use-case is a prediction market. We all know Augur and Truthcoin as trying to use crypto for this purpose, to discover truth effectively. Here I was hoping we could do something similar in a simpler way, but I was unsure what to chose for Steem users to predict. I settled on what the price is July 4th as that is of primary concern to all of us. Check out the self-referential prediction market post here.

Finally the case of gambling, which is kind-of like a prediction market, only that we need some method of selecting a random winner. I couldn't come up with a decent method, but I am confident that we can find a solution eventually that requires no trust. Check out the self-referential gambling post here.

Conclusion

Hopefully this discovery doesn't destroy the system or anything like that - better to flex and bend this system early on that to discover it later. Let us also take this opportunity to each of us think of flaws in these "games" and consider new ways to post that are not immediately obvious.