Yikes! This is going to be hard... but I'm not one to back away from a challenge.

Ned feels that SMTs will help balance Steem because you could create a coin, and give it to non-whales which they could redeem for Steem... which makes me wonder if we'll all get airdropped a NedCoin or similar.

The missing piece for me, is that I haven't found anywhere that tells you what the cost of creating a SMT is... they're redeemable for Steem, so they must have an initial cost, right?

The way I understand it all is this:
New York Times invests in Steem and creates 10,000 NYT coins.
New York Times then awards NYTs to anyone that provides them with useable photos.
Anyone with NYTs can then redeem them for Steem to power up their account, buy goods and services or exchange for Fiat.

My question is..... why?
Why not pay contributors in USD or with prizes? The answer could be the instant and feeless nature of Steem, but at the current rate of adoption it seems like it would reduce contributions...

I did read that SMTs could replace business processes, like an incident ticket at a repair shop, which means the business doesn't need any software or PoS devices, but I'm not sure how they'd get around the lack of privacy aspect.

All in all, I've explained nothing.... keen to see the other comments in this post.