I hope that some time over the next month or so, Ned will announce special prizes for the most thoughtful member contributions towards further progress in the SMT project. If he does so, I predict that this contribution will be among the prizewinners.
First, it makes clear what is the underlying problem that the SMT project is addressing and the related strategy. Second, it points to some important issues or hurdles that would need to be addressed as we go forward in trying to implement the strategy.
As regards the strategy, I wonder if the field of potential applications should not be immediately broadened beyond media content. This might complicate the programming challenge significantly; but I strongly suspect that even within the field of media content, as we move among different sets of applications the software that embodies the protocol will need to be tweaked.
There is an implicit focus on enabling ICO’s, which could be tricky if the whole ICO process falls into deep disrepute because some prominent ICO's have conspicuously failed to deliver on their promises. As you are aware, there is already speculation in the literature that a cloud could come over the entire ICO movement if there are only a few of these well-publicized failures to deliver.
Then there is a question of the arrival of stringent regulations, with China and Korea already delivering I heads-up for the rest of us.
What's my point here? It might be a good idea to search hard for use cases that do not have such a prominent focus on facilitating ICO’s.
As I reflect upon my multiple burn scars from trading options, I feel compelled to throw cold water on speculations about what will cause upward revaluation in STEEM price. Revaluations upward or downward will always be a function of multivariate processes; so no matter what we think a particular force among these processes might do, when you get down to cases it is very difficult to predict accurately what is actually going to happen because of the other forces in the ‘pot’.
Finally, the image of bewildering fragmentation of content already besets Steamit, from my perspective as a newcomer in the Steamit space . I would worry a lot if this problem gets much worse.
Here's an example. This morning I wrote a short and somewhat silly piece (silly if I thought it would make any money) about practices programmers should follow in presenting and writing about code for the purposes of helping those coming from other programming languages or people on the edge of programming who would like to get in.
The piece seemed to disappear from the “New” menu in about 10 minutes, and when I came back another 10 minutes later to try and locate it, that became quite a struggle! Even going into the section where I thought the classification process would place the piece I couldn't find it.
This little incident tells you that the people who are crowing about how you will make money writing on Steeemit need to base their advice on some more sophisticated research about the process. (It’s not easy, and nor should it be.) I certainly emerged from this process of trying to find my little piece with a strong feeling that the entire procedure of allocating articles to sections needs major surgery.