RE: Synopsis of Steemit Community Members’ Views on Issues to Address in Roll-Out of SMTs
Hello again Alex!
I am not able to find a copy of my initial response to your comment so let me now offer my belated and heart-felt “thank-you”! When I finish doing this message to you, I will hop over to your YouTube channel and Like and Subscribe!
I do have good news. I finally found Crypto Nights and your episode 5 within Steemit, after using a rather complex search phrase in Google. Once I found this episode, I realized that you have a YouTube channel. It never occurred to me to search for you on YouTube channel. Sorry!
I enjoyed your episode 5 of Crypto Nights, and will go back and listen to previous episodes as well as wait for new ones. I feel that the subject of SMTs is so complex that you should plan to have some more episodes digging into particular aspects, especially after the SMT program has been rolled out and announced as publicly available. The rumour has it that this will happen at Steemfest in November.
As I think about what you might do as further programming about SMTs, there seems to be one aspect of that project to which you could make important contributions via selected interviews. I am referring to what I would call the “social support requirements” for success on the part of a new SMT token and its related entities and activities.
Steem Inc., Steemit, and the Steem blockchain and associated software engineering will have little control over this huge variable, which will lie largely within the orbit of the said entities and activities.
You are probably wondering what I mean by “social support requirement for success”. Instead of attempting a proper discussion of this concept, it is sufficient here to go to its bottom line.
A successful SMT will be one where there is an external (to the said entities) demand for the token in the trading market. That is, there will be sustained and substantial ranks of buyers who are ready to exchange their fiat money in order to acquire the coin. (Perhaps another crypto currency might serve well as the unit to be exchanged for the coin; but I am willing to bet you that that is going to be meaningful only if that currency is readily exchangeable into fiat money.)
If the New York Times came on board and we had an NYT Smart Media Token (NYT-SMT) they probably would get to that bottom line fairly quickly; because they already have an awesome social support network. (The social support network is something multidimensional, and it goes far beyond being popular in social media: Facebook, Twitter, Steamit, etc. The best exposition of the rich dimensionality of this concept that I have seen so far in the crypto currency space is to be found near the second half of my video here:
When you think about those social-support dimensions taken together, you will realize right away that if your Local Village Times or the Society of Astronomers started their own Smart Media Tokens, it will take them many months to get to the point where there is a substantial external-to-the-community demand for their tokens. Let’s put this huge point plainly: anybody can create their corporate or personal tokens (we already have Canadian Tire money (it has some resemblance to dollars), XYZ Gift Cards, etc.); but success means there is a buyers’ market for those tokens (like the 1930s baseball cards these days). It is a good bet that several future SMTs will achieve this success; but if they will start out as your “Local Village Times”, they will be waiting many months to build up the required social support.
That building-up process is one that I believe would be very largely on the shoulders of the leaders and members of the pertinent SMT community. Where we might find such communities that are already close to achieving the said bottom line, and what will have to be done by those that are far away from it, could be a subject of some interesting interviews on Crypto Nights! Your theme could be: “Okay you have you a bright new SMT. How do you make it a success?”
Cheers!