Why Steem and Smart Media Tokens?
Here's a simple idea.
The best universal way of coming up with solutions is to attach incentives around any given problems. Start-up accelerators and VCs illustrate this well enough from an investor's perspective. Zooming out into the story of societies, it's clear to see that communities always emerge and revolve around resources. Place a candy in the middle of nowhere and the ants will come. For us, this goes from material to human capital.
When I joined Steemit back in mid-2016, I was certainly fascinated by the potentials of Steem the instant I used it. The general idea here is for anyone to contribute anything at all to the Steem network and subsequently get rewarded with tokens through community voting. Transactions are also free and almost instantaneous, rendering the experience seamless without the usual oddities of blockchain technology. This blew my mind back then, and I've written about how it could potentially enable companies to be more open, porous organisations. Anyone can now tap into a global pool of human resources to improve their ventures with the Steem protocol, breaking down the barrier between producers and engaged consumers.
However, Steem alone is not going to flourish long-term without playing to the strengths of sub-communities. Major, all-encompassing currencies are too encumbered to properly house many diverse values, in my opinion. It's a matter of communities being able to create and curate relevant contributions without the friction of social complexity and conflicts of interest. So in theory, different communities are best optimised through the use of different social currencies. In a nutshell:-
Huge communities with large capital reserves are relatively less defined, messy, and lossy when it comes to distribution. This disadvantage of diversity also has its advantages, of course. Drawing parallels to the real world, the bootstrapping of the Steem economy over the past year has created a plethora of general works from open-contributions. This includes the many different forms of production, curation, and community regulation.
Inversely, small communities with limited capital reserves are relatively more defined, organised, and lossless. Compared with large communities, niche communities are more manageable with better focus, which may lead to better chances of generating good revenue streams. Just like any enterprises.
This is why SMTs are game-changers.
In essence, projects, communities, and currencies are merging with the advent of decentralisation technologies. All projects revolve around communities anyway, being social in nature. The insight here is the importance of rewarding project contributors to spur growth. Steem is already enabling this universally, and SMTs could very well take this concept to the moon. With the right incentives and workflow in place, SMTs could pave the way for better communities as it is conceivably easier to reward contributors and work on achieving goals. That said, SMTs will also benefit from the general works produced by content creators, curators, and regulators coming from the larger Steem community.
It all seems to me like a fundamental breakthrough for just about anyone to start creating their own currencies and communities, leveraging on both the blockchain infrastructure and capital liquidity available on Steem. Low-barrier deployment. Everyone can get involved because the basic level of participation is simply social contribution, in which complexity can be built upon. This will become clearer as we subscribe to different SMTs, aligning our interests and maximising our returns. For early adopters, we now have a great reason to use Steem to bootstrap projects on the platform, just like how early adopters of Ethereum are using ethers to fund the ERC-20 token projects.
The simplicity of Steem and Smart Media Tokens is likely to light up many ideas, even for non-technical adopters who are usually excluded from the process of creating their own cryptocurrencies. With SMTs on the horizon, it's now definitely a great time to start figuring out ways to get involved in building awesome communities. For one, I am thinking about making my favourite website https://aeon.co operate on SMTs, creating a collaborative economy between great writers, editors, and other relevant contributors.
The same goes for the indie electronic music industry in which I am interested in. Pretty sure there will be many use cases for anyone that could benefit from having a loyalty-points system - be it the local hipster coffee joint, or a family's newspaper company. All we have to do is take a look around for ways to innovate, and this includes bridging traditional ventures out there. Problem-solving with Steem and SMTs could be a big part of future communities. Is this one of those basic layers that will define the evolution of the World Wide Web? Let's make it happen.
Resources
- Steem's SMT website: https://smt.steem.io/
- SMT whitepaper: https://smt.steem.io/smt-whitepaper.pdf
Follow me @kevinwong
I've been reading some more of that Aeon stuff after you showed me the blog the other day... really great blog! I think you are right, they would be a great case study for how to utilize SMTs.
The big challenge for me so far is - how to explain the technical side of SMTs to people who might not even be familiar with blockchain beyond a vague awareness of bitcoin. It's a lot of info to chew on... but I think there is a way.
I had a recent conversation with a successful local entrepreneur in Raleigh's music industry and.. he was more open to it than I expected. The idea of generating revenue from content, without supporting random advertisements from Coca Cola / etc, seems to be a powerful incentive for business owners to learn more.
Good point! It's a good time to explore the possibilities of SMTs and I think there'll be good use cases coming out of unexpected places.
This is breath taking...beautiful work dear
Hello! Re. “The big challenge for me so far is - how to explain the technical side of SMTs to people who might not even be familiar with blockchain … but I think there is a way.” I feel you have put your fingers on one of the tall hurdles in the path of cryptos going mainstream.
Also, it does not help that computer science professors and their students seem to have believed they should feel free to distort the usual usage of several common English words, and then expect ordinary people to simply accept that and learn to talk their way.
These are the same ordinary people that are their future clients to whom it is sometimes crucial to explain things clearly. There is not enough money inside computer science for them to get away with such sloppy communication practices, in my opinion. The leaders of the SMT project should make a big effort to get a breakthrough on clear communications to non-technical people.
One helpful step would be to show the pseudo-code of a protocol and not the code in a specific language’s syntax. A great deal of what we call “development” is designing the rules and steps of a protocol, which rarely requires that we start by writing computer code.
Moreover, there is nothing in computer science that makes people geniuses at this particular step of protocol design (they are geniuses in expressing the rules and steps in the code of a specific language), so all you have to do is represent the design using plain language before you get into the computer code. Then you use that plain-language version to talk to clients.
At the same time - does "mainstream adoption" require most people to understand the technical details?
The only people who need to deeply understand this are the CTOs, the technical leaders of the corporations that will leverage SMT technology. For those people, the white paper for SMTs should be easy to understand.
Hell, even for me - it only took about two hours to go through the paper and understand all the key points. How much easier does it need to be? Consider that this is technology which creates a new currency. I think there's some complexity inherent in that.
will it be possible to redeem those SMT tokens back to Steem Power ?
It depends on market value. But yes the point is that SMTs have their liquidity pool in Steem just like ERC20 tokens and ethers.
A SMT will be exchanged through STEEM, so we won't have a pack of SMTs and STEEM only one of them. We will have STEEM, and after that a cluster of SMTs over STEEM. Market-wise, this will in all probability help interest for STEEM, as a token.
Additionally, the SMT age system is far more mind boggling than only a token issuance on the Ethereum stage. When you dispatch a SMT, you truly dispatch a thin layer of Steem-application-forms over your substance, including your own particular prizes pool, your own particular swelling model, your own particular voting and curation calculations and your own vesting component.
Hope this helps.
so If I want to create an SMT, I need to put Steem Power into it . This is the point where my SMT gets value?
from the WP
Nicely put. It works right out the box with Steem-like features!
SMT is their own content economy just like Steem is? There own free floating value? How would you trade such a low liquidity token like that through Steem? Just curious about the liquidity of the SMT since we are talking mini-micro tokens at least to start with under $10,000 in total cap.
Would be nice if you name the source @bbomber which is @dragosroua in my post this morning.
Do you know if there is a dicussion forum or space focused on SMT topic?
I have some questions regarding the white paper..
Good question. Maybe there's already one on chainbb, using certain tags. Maybe the smt tag. We can start in this post if you want to lol :). There are dozens of other SMT-related posts as well!
Best to discuss in a topic oriented forum or a channel on discord, so info is shared.
That's right. It'd be better for the more "official" channels to start this so we can have a good discussion going in a concentrated forum.
I believe your best bet would be simply to write a post about it and tag SMT.
Smeemit inc is asking for transparency and open debate and co-creation here. And there's no better way to do so than on the blockchain.
This is a great addition to the discussion of SMT that seems to be blowing up! You have me thinking about ideas for restarting former communities that were killed by Facebook and other social media sites, this idea could help bring like minded people, or people with similar interested back into a local-like community. I remember when forums for specific topics were huge and were the place to be. Do you think that SMT's could revive that culture?
:) since itll be some kinda API any app owners can use to integrate as part of their UI/UX, why not?
Following the announcement made yesterday, I have kept on thinking on ways where I could also create my own token and use to reward my followers and those having same passion!
This is really a game changer and we will see amazing growth soon in Steem and Steemit!
It's a race for coming up with the next best Steem-like token!
Awesome summary, and I share your enthusiasm. Steem is not just Steemit. There is so much more going on here.
The more demand for steem the better. As SMT is being built on the Steem block chain I support any project that will spawn from it !
Awesome news before the weekend, It can't get much better than that :)
Thank god it's Friday, thank god for Steem/ it/ whatever is coming :)
well it is up to us in this burgeoning steemit community to see if we can bootstrap new coins and develop new ideas...
So far we have just had the SMT announcement but no launch time or further info (I guess we will get that in due time)
I have a few ideas rattling around in my mind but I guess until more clarity is coming from @ned and the team we will have to be patient and maybe make rough drafts of our own whitepapers
Its a race to come up with the first couple of awesome SMTs. Good time to get excited, but yeah more info would be good although the WP is pretty comprehensive atm :)
@kevinwong, thanks for explaining SMTs in simple terms. I've upvoted and will resteem this post.
What would be really good is if you could guide us (here on STEEMIT) on how you went about using this innovation on your first website or blog. That would be so useful for non-techie people like me. Keep up with the great posts !
Smart Media tokens is really a game changer.
The people who will benefit the more are the ones who are already here!
This news has left Steem in green in the coin market cap as other currencies are in red!
Steemit is exploding soon,more users will be joining us.
Go Go Steemit.