RE: Why the proposal of leveraging the Steem Blockchain with Social Media Tokens is MASSIVE news..!! Effectively becoming a "Gold Backed Standard for Social Media"...!!"
I think it's quite different than using Bitcoin. Bitcoin's fees are too high to do this, and it's way too slow.
Imagine voting with Bitcoin. You click upvote and wait a minimum of ten minutes just to see your vote counted. Then there's a two or more dollar fee for your vote, which you have to pay directly from your external wallet.
With the SMTs your wallet will be built into the site like on Steemit. You log in, your funds are there, you vote directly with your stake, and the funds for the vote come from a rewards pool funded by inflation, which happens behind the scenes. There's none of the friction that comes with using an external currency. You don't even have to understand cryptocurrency to start using it. Sites will probably even offer free coins when new users sign up to get them started, like on Steemit.
All it will take is one or two sites with a few hundred thousand users adopting SMTs to get buzz going about this. The first ones will probably be sites run by people who are already big Steem holders and have a following. DollarVigilante comes to mind. When just one major site hops on board, game over.
imagine it'll be a bit more complicated than that and assume to realize a value worth cashing out you'd have to be on the site all day.
you're also not taking into account that if it doesn't already break the ToS of the platform they use it on (WP, YT, wherever) they will update it immediately if it gets popular.
companies like that don't want the liability. There isn't a kickback big enough for them to allow it.
Not sure what you mean with the ToS. If a site implemented SMT, why would they change the ToS to not allow it?
I can see a lot of companies not wanting to deal with liability issues, but then again there may be sites in countries other than the US where it's not really a problem.
Good to see some criticism of the SMT concept, you may be right. But I hope you're wrong.