DISCLAIMER: this post does not originate from angry or bitter feelings, as I believe Ricardo and the steemsports team have been doing a great job and I have a very good personal relationship with him (after some initial misunderstandings.) :-)

To the best of my knowledge, I have been the first person to offer an upvote-based bet on Steemit. I wrote this post over three months ago https://steemit.com/steemit/@claudiop63/steembets-bet-for-free-by-upvoting-and-win-steem-dollars-inauguration-bet-clinton-vs-trump

You will notice that its URL and content seem unrelated to each other...the reason is that originally the post's content was about a bet on the Clinton vs Trump race. The post got flagged by @smooth for "vote buying". I then felt that this was a strong warning from the community that vote-based bets were not in the spirit of Steemit, so I changed the content of the post (since I did not want to waste the promotion money I had invested) and forgot about my project on vote-based betting.

A few weeks later, Ricardo started steemsports, and to my surprise, he had gotten the explicit backing of several whales. His project then developed nicely. At some point, I created the steembets account, but never managed to unlock its potential, so I sold it a few days ago.

Why am I recalling all this? In order to claim ownership of the vote-based betting idea? Not at all... :-)

I am talking about this because this is a background to my proposal below, which aims at fostering the emergence of new ideas on Steemit in a "smooth" way (unintentional joke) :-)

Since the SP distribution in the community is still very uneven, and a few people hold strong "moral suasion" power, it might be useful to promote a "new projects" tags in order to allow innovative and potentially controversial projects, such as vote-based betting, to be put forward and collect community feedback. This would enable creative people to get some credit and visibility for their ideas, while reaching some sort of preliminary consensus on whether or not the key people in the community would support the project, mitigating the risk that projects which are similar to each other generate different flagging patterns....

Once again, I congratulate Ricardo for his success, and I look forward to disclosing on Steemit an innovative project of mine in the next few weeks, and seek community feedback...