Smart Media Tokens - What We Should Expect in the Future

Its no doubt that Steemit has established itself as the face of modern day social networking. The Steem blockchain has shown tremendous potential for the future. The community is increasing geometrically; In fact, we've had 62, 752 new registrations on the platform just these past few days of the year 2018!
Read @stephenkendal's post

This is a massively amazing feat to attain for any new social media platform, especially considering the fact that this space is a heavily contested arena. Truth is we are going to see much more of this in the coming months, obviously because this platform is revolutionary.

But there's more!!!
September 2017, @ned, CEO of Steemit announced a new innovation in a post which he called Smart Media Tokens

A Smart Media Token (SMT) is a native digital asset on the Steem blockchain that can be quickly launched by anyone to help monetize online content and create incentives to encourage desired user behavior.
http://smt.steem.io

ImageSource

Smart Media token aims at bringing every social networking activity to adopt the Steemit model. Everyone gets the opportunity to earn from their content and the reaction of the community towards it. This has proven to be sustainable and excellent model, as we see can see clearly how well it has succeeded in the case of Steemit. Ned thought it wise to extend this to everyone.

Obviously, many users love the idea of curating contents and getting rewarded for their content. However, not everyone has the technical know-how as well as financial capability and time to implement their own cryptocurrency or token from scratch.

This is where SMT comes in. With little effort, website owners would be able to extend on the Steem blockchain and have their own currencies on their platform.

This implies that, I as a developer for instance, wouldn't need to go through the struggle of trying to write something similar to the full Steem blockchain and Steemit algorithm to have a reward system on my platform. I would just use Smart Media Tokens.

ImageSource

Smart Media Tokens are a similar initiative to Ethereum's ERC-20 tokens. However, it has its own advantages, one of which is the super fast speed of transaction which has always been one of the selling points of Steem and Steemit. Also as we see on the Steem Network, transaction fees amount to Zero.

The SMT website as well as its White Paper has done a comprehensive and detailed presentation of the technicalities of this technology, the problems it solves as well as examples of its use case. Writing on those details will be redundant and unnecessary. You can read them here.
https://smt.steem.io/
https://smt.steem.io/smt-whitepaper.pdf

However, I want to share my thoughts on what I envision for the future and the changes I see coming...

** Website owners wanting to attract users to their website might organize competitions on their platforms and have users win tokens based on either referrals or voting.

** Fund Raising could be done for the company in the form of token ICOs

** Media Content Providers get to sell their content much more easily, collecting token payments as well as rewarding loyal fans.

** Forums such as stackoverflow and quora get to reward their users with tokens instead of just reputation points for their contributions.

Basically everything we do normally on the world wide web, but this time with a touch of monetary reward and interaction. Steemit has successfully demonstrated how effective it is to convert/win over an audience from a non-rewarding platform to one that rewards and ultimately urge them to improve the quality of their contribution. Website owners will strive to outwit each other using this strategy.

I see networks that never rewarded their customers having a change of heart as their active user base would be declining. SMTs are going to open the gateway to true decentralization and crypto rewarding to the average web owner, through "Proof of Brain"

SMTs are going to lead the future of social networking on the internet, of which all I see here is great potential for all that can tap into it. I really haven't been too hooked with programming for the blockchain. I always felt it had so much to do with cryptography, of which I wasn't really ready to worry my little head about. However, with the many opportunities arising and the obvious takeover by cryptocurrencies, I figured that sooner or later, I would need to start writing codes relating to blockchain and decentralization.

Consequently, I would be learning to program on the blockchain especially the Steem blockchain, and I will be sharing my experience and progress here on this platform.

Can't wait for SMTs to be officially launched so I can tear it apart!

To join me or share in my learning Curve, hit the follow button and let's do this!