Smart Media Tokens Are Awesome: This is Why Folks Are Freaking Out (And Also Some Concerns)

Smart Media Tokens.

These three words may well change everything about Steemit and the internet. One day SMT's might be looked at the same way that Steem and Steemit was by those of us who discovered it and recognized it for what it was: potentially world transforming.

Of course, like Steemit and Steem itself it could all come to nothing, SMT's disappearing over the blockchain horizon as a footnote in history. Obviously I don't believe that if I'm putting my time and energy into the platform, but it's important to acknowledge this despite, or even because of, the recent hype surrounding SMT's.

So what are SMT's?

That's a good question. You can get the technical explanation over at the whitepaper, but I think for our purposes the following is a pretty good explanation:

Steem will essentially serve as a 'gold standard' for other communities or individual bloggers in such a way that their value will be inherently attached and part of the Steem blockchain.

Okay, so what's the big deal?

Well, this means that in order to interact with or increase the value of Steem there won't be any interaction with Steemit itself, allowing a much wider base of people to participate and both take and give value on various platforms.

This is pretty huge news and the hype so far has been great (and honestly, I don't think hype is always a bad thing. Hype is needed to get the word out about things and often leads to a great result as long as the object or product delivers), but I do have some reservations and concerns.

The first concern is - what in the world is the process for setting up these tokens? For individuals and sites to really want to use this, there needs to be a super clear, relatively easy way to set up your SMT. The summary page seems to promise this (near the bottom where it mentions use cases and things like widgets and shows a simple form to create your token), so as long as they deliver and keep normal users away from having to deal with any nasty code we're probably okay on that front.

What else?

Well, there's going to be a fuck ton of useless tokens as people create them as quickly as they can think of them. How is this naming issue going to be dealt with in a way to avoid scammers and the like?

Okay. That's an issue, but not really a major one. What's something that could be a problem from the get go, on day one?

The value question. Super technical people might understand it, but your run-of-the-mill base user isn't. Where in the hell does the initial value of the tokens as they relate to Steem come from? If it's from an ICO, doesn't that mean that you need to have a pretty substantial user base to even have a hope in hell of launching an even somewhat valuable token? I mean as it is it's difficult to get comments on sites like YouTube if you have under a 100,000 subscribers, let alone on some back woods blog. How is the process streamlined for the people that would be contributing money to the ICO? If that's a dumb question then someone please explain it to me.

I do want to point out that I'm not trying to rip SMT's to shreds to feel pretty, if I want that I just look in a mirror. No, no. I'm doing it because I really, really want this to succeed. Even Ned himself has asked people to tear apart the idea so that they can find any major problems early on.

Honestly though, it says something that the above was my best shot at taking the idea down. Other than getting content creators to take it seriously and give it a try and then getting their users to do the same I can't really see anything that really feels like it's impeding SMT's or Steem. What's really exciting is that SMT's have the real possibility of greatly accelerating the current exponential explosion of Steem worldwide because of it's ability to reach the millions of people who already have significant platforms that aren't on Steem.

This is the future, folks. We get to participate in it. We get to make it happen.

I'm so pumped right now that it's really hard to express in words. I mean, just two years ago there was no such thing as Steem or Steemit. Look how far we've come since that time. That's how fast things are changing. I can't even conceive of how different things will be in just another year or two.

But no matter where we are one thing is for certain: I'm all in on Steem and have essentially bet my entire future on its success. Reckless? Yup. Some (many) might (certainly) even go so far as to call it fully irresponsible. They might be right. Then again, there's only one way to find out.

See you in the future.

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