Meetup in SF with Steemit CEO @Ned Scott

Getting ready to hear Steemit CEO Ned Scott @ned and CTO Jeffrey Paul speak about the vision for the new Smart Media Tokens.

Meetup hosted by the San Francisco Blockchain Collective. Great turn out - 209 RSVPed and I reckon we easily had 100, if not 150 in attendance. For a Meetup that is fantastic! Last week I went to a blockchain meetup with 100 RSVPs and maybe 20 showed up.

Thanks to the sponsors swarm.market, Token Garage, and Blockchain PR.

And we're off with @Ned

My Notes:

• Blockchain meetups are usually very technical people and traders - what about the rest of us? That's Steemit!
• Almost everyone attending indicated they have used Steemit
• About 50% have heard of Smart Media Tokens
• Ned got into Bitcoin in 2013 and started networking with blockchain minded folks
• Started brainstorming on Steem ideas in 2015
• Running on delegated proof of stake
• Came up with Proof of Brain to reward block creators
• SMT like Ethereum ERC20 tokens
• Working on decentralised oracles for verification of user actions - like walking
• Steem becomes the gas for SMTs but you don't have to burn it. Causes bandwidth rate limiting
• Influence sharing - allow another token to have voting rights. Eg. NYT gives rights to WaPo users to bootstrap there comment community
• Some parameters will be tunable, others can never change like token emission rate params
• a pivotal moment was getting his mother on it posting about gardening so it wasn't just all about crypto
• no reputation is not part of Steem, there will be "lots of experiments" around it

If you want a video of the meetup there is one taken by @virtualgrowth here:

From post by @virtualgrowth: https://steemit.com/steem/@virtualgrowth/41ecsq-steemit-ned-talking-about-smart-media-tokens-live

I may not have got the bigtime upvotes for this post on this but at least I got the last question about reputation.

I think the lack of a reputation solution is a huge deficiency in SMT - a pure up/down vote system that an SMT powered comment system would give you out of the box is pretty weak IMO. Where's the real differentiator, and where is the incentive for people to put a lot of effort into one site and stick with it.

Without reputation, a site would miss out on all the stabilizing influences of reputation, and without some kind of federation each site would have to build a new system and figure out for itself from scratch. Maybe that is what it wants but it should have the option to inherit and/or share some reputation.

Federation would help immunize the entire network from trolls and prevent a troll from flipping from SMT to SMT to SMT starting afresh each time. Figuring out how to federate reputation (optionally) around SMT tokens would be a huge incentive for people to come to SMT powered sites or to add SMT to their sites.

Maybe the oracles mentioned in Ned's talk could be used to spread reputation around and maybe the sharing of voting rights he mentioned could also help. But instead of vague ideas I really feel like you need to offer something pretty compelling out of the box to make it a no-brainer solution - just like the ICO stuff that was built into SMT.

Perhaps a separate SMT entirely could be used to embody a federated reputation? I suppose that will have to be one of the experiments. Anyone care to brainstorm on ideas below?