Smart Media Tokens Use Cases, Caveats And Limitations - The SMT White Paper Series, Ep. Three
This article is part of a series in which I try to translate from Geek to English the SMT (Smart Media Tokens) white paper. The first two articles are:
- How To Deploy Your Own Smart Media Token On The Steem Blockchain - The SMT White Paper Series, Ep. One
- The Role Of Automated Market Makers For Smart Media Tokens - The SMT White Paper Series, Ep. Two
Today I'm trying to outline the benefits, or the use cases, of SMTs, along with some caveats and limitations not clearly exposed in the white paper.
1. Content Publishers: Bloggers, Authors, Photographers, Videobloggers
If you already have an online presence, you can leverage SMTs to engage your audience. In this case you will probably brand your token and try to make it original. Like a DROUA token, for instance. You will have your own Steemit-on-demand layer of functionality on top of your blog, it will literally be a shell over the Steem blockchain.
2. Forums / Communities
If you run a forum (bitcointalk, anyone?) you could use SMTs to incentivize people to contribute. In the white paper, this use case is about "multiple token support", which basically means you can have a generic token, MYFORUM, and then each sub-community can have its own token, MYGARDENING. In this setup, posts could be rewarded with all the available tokens of the forum. This use case blends with the no. 4 use case of the white paper, " Sub-Community Moderators and Managers", it's basically the same setup.
3. Widget Comments
The closest thing to this is the (in)famous Facebook widget comments we've see in so many websites. In this case I expect some UI parameters to be present, to make the widget customizable for your blog / site color scheme.
4. Arbitrary Assets
SMTs can also be used for arbitrary assets, or tokens you raise not necessarily for a content publishing platform but for a different type of business. In this case, you will probably not implement voting, or curation rewards, because this may not be useful, but you will work more complex vesting schemes for your investors.
5. Metalanguages
This use case is not present in the white paper, is just something that popped into my mind. For now it's just an idea, but I'm curious if this will actually come to life. Imagine you issue a token for a co-working place, like a real co-working place. Then you set up a card access system in your co-working place and link it to that token. Like, when somebody enters, they have to publish "In", as a Proof of Entrance. Then when they get out, they must publish "Out", as a Proof of Exit. Of course, this publishing may be masked under a QR code scanning or something. And for each action they publish, they may get some sort of rewards, by means of upvoting (and then curation, etc). The idea is that, because of the publishing features inside SMTs (rewards for content, rewards for curation), these SMTs can be soon integrated in some sort of metalanguages, or stuff that you inscribe in the blockchain as a Proof of Something and then use the rewards feature to generate liquidity. Of course, this use case sounds quite far fetched now, but how knows?
Caveats and Limitations
- in order to use SMT, one must have an account on the Steem blockchain. Irrespective of the fact that you're issuing tokens for a content publishing platform or for arbitrary assets. This is the most obvious, but probably the most overlooked caveat of SMTs. So even if you start your own token outside of the Steemit.com website, your commenters should have an account on Steemit. This caveat really puts in perspective the announcement in which "Steemit has partnered with SteemConnect". The ability to create accounts fast and reliably is fundamental for the spread of SMTs outside of the Steemit.com realm.
- the posts / comments / forum replies will have only a 7 days editing window and then will be immutably stored in the blockchain, which means they can't be edited anymore. Of course, if you control the UI of your blog / community / forum, you may choose which to show and which to hide from the blockchain, but the actual information will be there for as long as the blockchain will exist and everybody will be able to look it up with a block explorer.
- the storage and editing parameters above will be subject to decisions outside your control. If witnesses on the Steem blockchain decide to shorten the editing time period, or to store the data in a different container, you won't be able to do anything about it. Obviously, if you use Facebook comments, or Disquss, you're basically in the same situation - you can't control content stored outside of your own platform - just wanted to point that out.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you're new to Steemit, you may find these articles relevant (that's also part of my witness activity to support new members of the platform):
Thanks @dragosroua, your posts are extremely helpful in learning about the Steem platform, wish I could cast more than one witness vote for you!
A couple of comments/questions here - sorry in advance for the long comment! First you said:
Emphasis mine. But in the whitepaper it says:
So it seems like posts cannot (as proposed) be rewarded with all of the available Tokens - only 2 SMTs and STEEM. So a post in gardening can be rewarded only with MYGARDENING, MYFORUM, or STEEM. Let me know if I'm reading this wrong.
Second, in your "Metalanguages" section you write:
I was wondering if you could expand on how you see this working? I was thinking about some very similar ideas - i.e. using the Steem rewards system to incentivize things other than straight content publishing - but I'm not able to visualize how that would work exactly.
In your example above with the proof of entrance/exit, how exactly do you see those actions being rewarded? Would there be a site where users can see the entrances and exits and upvote them? Or were you thinking something like the founder's account with a large % of the Tokens auto-upvotes each entrance/exit via some algorithm? Or maybe some other method I'm not thinking of?
Very interested to hear your thoughts - if the "Metalanguages" concept you proposed can work I think that can open SMTs/Steem up to a much larger audience outside of the traditional content publishing space!
Yes, a single post can receive rewards with maximum 3 types of tokens, but in the entire ecosystem can be more than 3 tokens coexisting at the same time. That's what I mean with "all the available tokens of the forum."
I was thinking at some sort of app that reads the blockchain for specific "words" or "commands" or "actions", like "in/out" example, for a specific community. The community part doesn't have a very strong enforcement now, but I'm expecting it to be clearly defined once they actually implement it. But for now you can "mimic" a community with a hashtag, or by simply maintaining an off-chain list of accounts that you "monitor". So you read the posts of those accounts and for each "action" you set a specific "reaction", like, for instance, an entrance is upvoted once by the owner, then when an exit occurs, the app can calculate the time between "in" and "out" and rewards the user with an upvote for the number of hours spent in that coworking space. Subsequently, you can buy coffee with such commands, or rent meeting rooms.
Of course, they will look odd on the blockchain, and probably
custom_jsonoperations can be used for this type of payload in a much cleaner way.Sorry for the slow reply, had a long day! Hopefully you're still up for this discussion because I have another question about the three types of "votable" tokens per post. Take the following scenario from the gardening forum example:
I have some vested STEEM, MYFORUM and MYGARDENING tokens in my account. Then I vote on a post with those three votable assets. Does that mean the post's payouts in STEEM, MYFORUM, and MYGARDENING increase relative to my vested shares in each?
It seems like that would be the case for MYFORUM and MYGARDENING but it doesn't make as much sense for STEEM, otherwise people using the "MyForum" site would start getting STEEM rewards for their posts and they may not even know what STEEM is.
Also on page 57 of the whitepaper it says:
That sounds to me like Steem Power can be used to vote and increase the rewards paid out in SMTs which doesn't make sense to me. Why would you want someone with a bunch of Steem Power and no MYFORUM/MYGARDENING tokens to be able to come in and influence the rewards on gardening forum posts?
I'm not sure I really understand the above quoted paragraph or how vested STEEM affects SMT payouts and why STEEM is always considered a votable asset on all posts.
As long as any SMT is created "off of" Steem, both as currency and as application layer, then the primary interaction will always come from Steem. So any new content platform will be always votable with Steem first and then with its specific SMT. Try to imagine it without this and you'll soon see how it can spiral out of control.
Great write up and thank you. I can definitely see how using the voting/rewards platform could be extremely useful and valuable to many forum/community based websites. It could create excite and increase user involvement tremendously.
I also see the limitations as far as control, which is no small thing.
My thoughts are still firmly entrenched with wondering how this will affect the Steem block chain in the future and the value of Steem. I see the pros and cons, but I also see the incredible possibilities of Steem as a global, everyday usable currency for transactions. SMTs in my mind would help advance this greatly. Would very much like to hear your thoughts concerning this. Thank you.
I'm on the same page with you, concerning the potential growth of STEEM, as a currency, as a result of SMT implementation. I see and "Ethererum effect", which drove the Ethereum price up as a result of all the ERC-20 tokens issued on that blockchain. Allegedly, because of the application layer and zero fees transactions, in our case the growth can be even bigger.
I still remember when I bought 4 Ether with 40 EUR, almost a year ago.
Thank you for this @dragosroua, it is one of the most useful posts about SMT I have read so far.
Those three caveats and limitations you mention are all important and have so far largely been skipped over in most of the posts heralding the arrival of SMTs.
Coming from a community activist background I have been exploring ways to use steemit to establish SteemTowns. These are in essence blockchain powered local community networks.
But I have hit a number of barriers with this. It is a very hard task to fit a community network into steemit. It lacks the tools to do much of what such a network needs (eg what's on calendars, jobs databases, ability to filter out NSFW content for use in schools etc).
With the arrival of SMTs it does look like they might provide the vehicle to implement the SteemTowns idea in a more powerful way.
However these limitations of SMTs might still be an issue.
One particular problem for SteemTowns, and in fact any platform or site using SMTs in most of Europe, will the inability to be able to delete content.
The EU's 'right to be forgotten' legislation I believe forces site owners to remove content if requested. How would that work on the blockchain?
The inability to edit after 7 days could also be a problem.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
This is an awesome question! I could be wrong but since you control your site (or SteemTown as you call it) you could always remove content from your site, but not the Steem blockchain which you don't control. This may satisfy the "right to be forgotten" legislation.
Yes that is a possibility I guess. I wonder if it would satisfy the EU law makers?
Thinking about it more - it's the Steem blockchain that's actually storing the content, so I would think that to operate in the EU it would need to abide by the "right to be forgotten" regulations, which it obviously can't since it's immutable. So this could potentially be a legal framework for the EU and other governments with similar laws to ban Steem-based services in their jurisdictions.
That could be a big potential problem for the future of the platform. In theory I think the same argument could be applied to Bitcoin or any blockchain really...
I have been wondering about this since I started on steemit.
I run a big community news network that has been running since 1995. It has over 60,000 pages of content and I quite regularly get right to be forgotten requests. As it is a standard web based system I can comply without a problem.
If I was editor of a steem/blockchain based network I wouldn't be able to comply.
I guess somewhere along the line, and possibly quite soon, a legal case will come up. Not sure how steemit inc will handle that - but I am sure the lawyers will be happy 😊
If there is such a legal requirement, then I think we could have a problem. At the UI level a website can enforce policies for not showing certain data, but that data will always be present in the blockchain, that's the goal of a blockchain after all, to keep data immutably, for ever.
This is the wikpedia about it :
And the full EU details are in this document :
I guess it will take lawyers to pull this apart to see how it will apply, or not, to blockchain based systems.
If the EU legislation does apply I am sure there will be some interesting test cases as blockchain sites like steemit add to their content base.
My question is, what is the barrier to entry? With my very very limited knowledge, it seems we could do this anyway with ETH? I really don't see how this is game-changing. I have read so many posts from well-known authors on this, yet I still fail to understand why this is so amazing. It all comes down to my lack of understanding, obviously, but I would love to know why this will not cause even more people to potentially lose their money through ICO scams than we are currently witness?
It's still unclear. In the initial version of the white paper there are mentions of either 1SBD or 1000SBD as the required fees to launch your own SMT. We'll see when it launches.
No, you can't. Suppose you write the entire application layer yourself (code for posting, voting, curation, vesting mechanisms, etc) on Ethereum you will still have to pay gas for each operation. What you get with SMT is Steemit-on-demand.
I like what you're trying to do with this series, make SMTs simpler to understand while explaining possible shortcomings and possible solutions.
I might have mentioned this before as well, SMTs are not for everybody on steemit, you will need some technical skills and understanding of how the steem blockchain works in order to implement or create your own SMT.
Maybe if SMTs catch on, developers on steemit will have a lot of freelance work available, creating SMTs for popular authors on steemit who have little to no knowledge of the underlying blockchain.
yeah, good catch
@dragosroua,
I think I will restart from EP 1! Want to absorb this update well! Keep it up friend!
Cheers~
Hi, here is the 3rd trasnlation of your series :) Thanks for let me translate it into Spanish. Many people say that now they understand the SMTs, you made it very easy to because the way you wrote the articles, really good!
https://steemit.com/spanish/@trans-juanmi/serie-el-white-paper-de-los-smts-episodio-3-casos-de-uso-de-los-smart-media-tokens-advertencias-y-limitaciones-traduccion-de-una
Thank you, looks very nice :)
What if I have a youtube channel or a group in facebook or other traffic in an other social media ? Can I monetize it with SMT ?
I don't think so. You can use SMTs only if you control your content platform.
Very beautifully sumerized
looks like smt's will be everywhere