When Ned Answers Questions about Smart Media Tokens - Transcript

Ned: Hey guys! I'm Ned CEO of Steemit.

Last week I came to you and asked for questions regarding Smart Media tokens and how they're going to play into the whole Steem ecosystem and with all the apps that are building on Steem like chainBB and Busy.org and Steemit.com and eSteem, the mobile app and all that stuff.

So there were some great questions, but there were two recurring themes that I want to address most. The first was what's going on with Steemit.com development and how do SMT's impact it? And the second is what's the deal with ICOs through Smart Media Tokens? And is that something we need to be concerned about for Steem the ecosystem?

So, with regards to Steemit.com, there's a ton going on inside the organization that's developing that the organization is SteemitInc. We have a much larger team than we've ever had. There's more than 30 people on the team now including 20 or 23 developers, majority of whom are working on back-end and front-end development, Steemit.com related tools.
And then also we have eight developers now working on the blockchain Steem, contributing code there that hopefully the witnesses will adopt including the Smart Media Token code. Hopefully they'll adopt early in 2018 so as far as Steemit.com development it's moving full steam ahead. I'm very excited about what we're doing there there's lots coming. All I can say is stay tuned I love this product and there's lots more we can do there.

As far as the second question that came up in a recurring manner which is what's the deal with ICOs through Smart Media Tokens how is that going to impact us, the Steemians, how's it going to impact Steem?
There are certainly regulatory concerns for anyone who's doing an ICO no matter what platform they're going to use, whether it's ethereum or counterparty or smart media tokens on Steem.

So I advise anyone who's thinking about that, consult your lawyers, talk to them, find out what the deal is. You don't want to be out there creating securities if you're trying to create currencies for your business. If you want to create a sub currency for your business make sure you do it in a way where you're not also creating a security and there are ways to do that. So make sure you go through the proper methods and processes to do that. Get the supporting evidence from your lawyers. I'm not a lawyer but I'm telling you you should get one. So that's the thing there.

And then as far as like anyone being concerned about us writing software for Steem that enables ICOs; there's nothing illegal about writing software. We're writing software to improve the protocol in many ways. Not just through the ICO smart contract but honestly the burden of the issue here really falls on the people who are potentially doing ICOs so that's really where the burden falls. And like I said, I recommend that people, you know, take the proper counsel there. But ultimately the whole protocol, all the software development, I believe it's going to be huge, very big for Steemit, very big for Steem, very big for all the other apps that are gonna build on this platform and I'm very excited about the potential here.

Thank you guys for your questions I hope to get to more of them very soon!

-epilogue-

Hey guys, Ned here, we just put up another video. It was sort of a direct response to some of the questions we've gotten in the last video and all the threads there. And I just want to take this opportunity to ask you what you think of this process, if you like this sort of medium this back and forth of questions. If there's any way we can do it better let us know below and if you have any more questions leave those below too, thanks.

^{DISCLAIMER: all the above contents are clearly not mine, original post by @ned here: https://steemit.com/smt/@ned/answers-steemit-development-and-icos-w-smts-video
..I've just made a transcript - Fitz}