I had a giveaway a few days ago powering up STEEM for participants.

Here is the post: Steem Power Giveaway - Completely Free!

Background

Originally, I had 20 STEEM sitting in my wallet that was ready to be given away. However, within an hour or two there were already more than 20 participants!

I didn't want to split the total up any more than 20 times, and I didn't want to do leave anyone out by choosing the first 20 (my original plan) or randomly choosing 20. So I made the decision to up the total to 30 STEEM, and just buy the STEEM after the giveaway ended to cover the difference!

A few hours later, there were already 30 or more, but the giveaway had only been going on for such a short time. Originally I was planning 24 hours for the giveaway, to give all a chance, but now, lots of people wouldn't have even seen it yet if they are in a really different timezone.

So I decided to up the total to 40 STEEM. This was now double my starting total, so I later had to cover the difference.

Anyway, looks like there was a total of 36 participants, left no one out, even if they forgot one of the rules to put in their comment a fun complete-the-sentence, haha.

Logistics

As there were 36 total people, each got an even amount from the total, which comes out to be 1.111 STEEM -

It would have been a pain to do all these transactions manually, so I had scrapped together through code all the participants from the comments, and ran a list of piston commands to power up to them. Piston is a wonderful tool from @xeroc that makes it easy to interface with the Steem blockchain.

Then I had to reply to all the participants' comments. While I could have used piston for this too, I just manually replied to all in the web interface, pasting a template and changing it slightly per comment to make it relevant.

The thing is that you have to wait 20 seconds between posting comments. So this took a while. Haha.

Again! Again!

I will definitely do this again in the future, using payouts from posts to fuel the giveaway. Though I haven't gotten any whale attention recently, I will keep posting and contributing and never give up. Even if it comes down to it, I will fuel my giveaways from my own pocket. I have to balance what I want to keep as my own rewards from Steemit and what I want to give away. But I believe in good karma and I believe in the Steemit community.

Thoughts..

1 STEEM, or 1.111 for that matter, is probably not the biggest prize ever, but it's hard because there's so many of you guys and only one of me! I hope others with extra STEEM to spare will follow suit and do their own giveaways!

Also, I've been thinking about how to make such a giveaway as fair and widespread as possible. Should participants with less STEEM get more? Should the participants be randomly selected, making the prize bigger for the winners?

What do you think?

Do check out what I've been up to!

    Steemit EasyEdit - Let's Make the Editor Great! (Again?)

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