#Decentralized-Internet Writing Competition: August Results Announced!

It's official - the Decentralized Internet Writing Contest is a great success! So far, we have received 260 stories and given prizes to 11 winners. As always, we got some superb decentralized internet stories in August. So here we are with more prizes for our writers.

Keep Those Amazing Stories Coming, Comrades!

For newbies who want a little context - HackerNoon has built a partnership with Free Ton giving away monthly prizes worth 3,500 TON to the best HackerNoon decentralized internet stories!

Here's how you can participate:

• Set up an account on HackerNoon.
• Check out the Decentralized Internet Writing Competition's rules.
• Pen your story and submit it with #Decentralized-Internet as one of the tags.

So, who are the winners for the month of August? 👀 Let's find out.

Top 15 Contenders for the Month of August

First, we picked all the stories tagged with #Decentralized-Internet on HackerNoon, published in August 2021. As always, we chose the top 15 stories using an algorithm that gives 60:30:10 weightage respectively to:

• Number of hours read
• Number of people reached
• Freshness of the content

Here is the list of our top 15 contenders:

1. How To Stake ETH 2.0 Without Running a Node and 32 ETH
2. Why YouTube’s biggest competition will come from decentralized video platforms
3. Banks Make Money Off you, Not for You - Unhashed #16 by @musharraf
   
4. Future Expectations: What Will Affect Ethereum Price in 2021? by @cryptoheisenberg
   
5. How Verifiable Creds, Decentralized Identifiers and Blockchain Work Together for a Safer Internet by @Fluree
6. In Decentralized AI We Trust by @mywaymywei
7. How Blockchain can Disrupt the Restaurant Industry by @Ishan Pandey
8. The Cryptocurrency Industry Is The Next Basic Infrastructure of The Internet by @johnnylyu
   
9. Miner Extractable Value (MEV): The Biggest Thorn in DeFi by @Ingalandia
   
10. The Graph and Web3 Take On Google and Web2: The Impending Data Economy Wars by @alexmexicotte
    
11. Plookup — An Algorithm Widely Used in zkEVM by @sin7y
    
12. Top 5 Crypto + Bitcoin Podcasts by @benjaminbateman
    
13. Avoid rug pulls, don’t get REKT, and DYOR; the degen’s definitive guide to DeFi by @financevote
14. The Lay of the Cryptoland - Part I: Coins, Wallets, and Exchanges by @archis
    
15. Lonero Needs the Hackernoon Community's Help by @TheLoneroFoundation

Human vs. Algorithm

Voting. Yes, voting. To keep the selection process transparent and to make sure our algorithm is not abused or misused in any way, we have kept the human factor in the selection process. Our editors then voted for their favorite stories from the above list.

Now let's announce the results.

How To Stake ETH 2.0 Without Running a Node and 32 ETH was the top choice of both algorithm and humans!

Congratulations @sergey-baloyan for winning 2000 TON crystals!

Staking in Ethereum 2.0 is blocking ETH in a smart contract to participate in the network as a validator and receive a reward for confirming blocks. Staking became possible after the launch of a new version of the network on the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm. This consensus algorithm is similar to well-known mining, but instead of using computational resources validators block coins in the wallet to run a special node.

In second place, we have Why YouTube’s biggest competition will come from decentralized video platforms.

Yay, @jeremykauffman you've won 1000 TON crystals

Decentralized video platforms can put in place governance structures to deal with illegal content swiftly. But decentralized platforms will always seek to prioritize user choice, and not restrict content based on social or political beliefs. For a functioning democracy and progressing society, people must be free to exchange and debate ideas, even unpopular ones. All kinds of mainstream ideas, like evolution, heliocentrism, the treatment of ulcers, even democracy itself, were once fringe. Where would we be today if all once-uncommon ideas were immediately silenced?

In Decentralized AI We Trust by @mywaymywei has won the third position and 500 TON crystals

There are countless examples that central authorities have been overstepping their boundaries to favor themselves when using AI whether it’s using data without user consent or promoting a neutral platform with intentionally biased AI decisions. Imagine if these AI services could prove to you how and when your data is being used - a mechanism that a third party could verify these AI services. Every transaction and decision made by these AI services are transparent for audit and can not be altered.

All winners are requested to contact [email protected] and [email protected] to claim their prizes.

All hail to decentralization💥. See ya next month!

Note: Free TON has now rebranded as Everscale.