Introducing SportsTalk.Social and SPORTS

I've often wondered when the first sports focused Steem condenser was going to be made. I had seen projects like Scorum exist and kept waiting for someone to step in to build a community here on Steem that's sole focus was around the sporting world. That time never came for me until now.

That's why I'm happy to announce SportsTalk.social! #sportstalk is the new home for all conversations related to the sporting world. You may be a huge fan of the #NBA and want to talk about USAvsCanada or maybe you prefer to spend your summer months watching #MLB to look for the dingers. Regardless of your favorite pastime you'll be welcomed here to discuss all of your favorite sports moments!

SportsTalk.Social

SportsTalk.social is built as a second layer on top of the Steem blockchain. Using SCOTBOT from the Steem Engine team we are able to deliver SPORTS tokens to users based on a predefined set of community rules. These rules govern the entire system and will help to ensure that good content moves up the system.

You'll be able to sign in here using your Steem account. If you'd like you can sign in with your keys directly from the site but I recommend using Steem Keychain to better secure your keys. Keychain will also allow you to manage your SPORTS tokens directly from your browser.

SPORTS Token

To curate the content shown on SportsTalk.social we have created a Smart Contract Organizational Token (SCOT) called SPORTS. SPORTS tokens will be rewarded to posts within the #sportstalk tag in a similar fashion to way Steem works. The biggest difference is that rewards and influence on SportsTalk.social will be built around the SPORTS token.

If you're not familiar with Steem then the concept is still pretty simple to jump into. Each post written will have a 7 day period where users can vote on it's value. As users vote the post's value will go up or down based on the amount of SPORTS they have staked in their wallet and the consensus on the piece's value. After 7 days of voting the resulting value will be paid out in a 50/50 split between the author and those who voted on the post.

As users earn SPORTS they can then decide how they'll want to use them. Some of the initial use cases will be to stake them in your account to increase yours or another users influence on future posts, promoting posts using our promoted posts tool or trading them with other users.

SPORTS Initial Distribution

There are currently 100,000,000,000 SPORTS in circulation with a maximum supply of 1T. To seed the network, SCOTBOT will be paying rewards out of the initial issued coins with plans to make a switch to inflation based rewards in a future network upgrade.

In addition to providing the initial seeding for the token's distribution there will also be a distribution of SPORTS tokens to a number of different accounts with the aims of improving the reach and growth of the network. The first distribution will be supplying tokens to @sportspartners with the aims of sending SPORTS to early users. If you'd like to be one of the first users of the platform please leave a comment below.

Initial Applied SCOTBOT Settings

In the interest of a fair launch I want to provide all of the settings that were applied to our instance of SCOTBOT. If you're not familiar with what these mean you will want to check out @holger80's excellent description of these parameters.

author_curve_exponent: 1
author_reward_percentage: 50
beneficiaries_account: sportsvoter
beneficiaries_reward_percentage: 10
cashout_window_days: 7
curation_curve_exponent: 0.5
downvote_power_consumption: 2000
downvote_regeneration_seconds: 432000
enable_account_muting: false
issue_token: false
json_metadata_app_value:
json_metadata_key: tags
json_metadata_value: sportstalk
miner_tokens: {}
mining_pool_claim_number: 0
mining_pool_claims_per_year: 0
n_daily_posts_muted_accounts: 0
other_pool_accounts: {}
other_pool_percentage: 0
other_pool_send_token_per_year: 0
pob_pool_percentage: 100
posm_pool_percentage: 0
promoted_post_account: sportspromo
reduction_every_n_block: 10512000
reduction_percentage: 0.5
rewards_token: 10
rewards_token_every_n_block: 1
staking_pool_claim_number: 0
staking_pool_claims_per_year: 0
staking_pool_percentage: 0
token: SPORTS
token_account: sportstalksocial
vote_power_consumption: 200
vote_regeneration_seconds: 432000
vote_window_days: -1

These settings are likely to change in the future. You'll want to follow @sportstalksocial and myself to be sure you're aware of any future changes.

What Do You Think?

There will many more updates coming in future posts. I just wanted to get as many details out about what SportsTalk.social is as quick as possible so people could start using it. If you have any suggestions or things you want to see done then please let me know! I want to see more sports content within Steem and I think this will be an excellent way to encourage that!