Great video @louisthomas ! I love how you are genuine about what you know and what you don't understand yet.
You said that Smart Media Tokens are a way that steem enables anyone to create his own crypto very easily, which is correct, but this needs a bit of clarification.
SMTs are a way to "tokenize" and monetize the internet. It means that anyone will be able to monetize his website, exactly the same way as steemit is monetized. You could say that Steem is the smart media token for the platform steemit. Soon you could see the "Louis Thomas token" which is used to monetize content on one of your website, for example www.louisthomas.com.
This means that users will be able to buy this smart media token, and even earn this SMT by commenting and by curating on your website. All the SMTs will be launched from the steem blockchain, so steem will become "the Ethereum of Smart Media Tokens".
What is amazing about SMTs is that they are very easy to implement and very customizable. While creating our own SMT, we will be able to customize the inflation rate, coin supply, etc... When a big website or mobile application decides to launch its own SMT, it will have the possibility to do it as an ICO.
Today, the value of steem comes mainly from the use of steemit.com (but also other growing platforms like Dtube). After the release of SMTs, which is due to be in early 2018, thousands of websites and mobile applications will be able to add SMTs on their platforms. Every social media, newspaper or personal blog that uses SMTs will add value to the Steem blockchain, hence the huge potential.
Thank you for the clarification Marc!
I feel that people might be better served by focussing on a very few social media platforms rather than enabling the launch of one that might fragment the market too much. If people want an alternate to Facebook/Twitter then Steemit is a good choice and as you say has the advantage of first mover in the blockchain space. However if it then fragments itself, even if the overall platform grows, then I feel its name and power might diminish as a brand. If I was Facebook I would be glad if there was suddenly a whole raft of choices of platform because I know that I top the reputation and history stakes and have the money to crush an competitor as they rise. Also I said in a previous post it also fragments the wealth of good chat/comments as these get spread across many platforms.
Do you not think, Facebook & Google etc. are doing their own coin and monetize content, before steemit is stealing their "customers" and they are loosing market-share?
Maybe steemit won't do it, maybe it will. We will never know until it happens.
And this is something we all need to understand: Steem is not about steemit. Steemit is just a platform that creates a real use for the cryptocurrency steem. Maybe the next big social media that rivals facebook will be created in one or two years using the steem blockchain, but it won't be steemit.
That said, I can see that steemit has a huge first mover advantage and a fast growing community, so it is very well positionned to be that revolutionary social media.
This is the central question, isn't it? Would love to know. I would think that at some point they would need to if platforms like Steemit start to cut into them. If not, it will be business as usual.
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True, steemit's chain actually encourages interaction and use of the chain, whereas other coins don't really put that at the forefront and will thus lose out when people actually want to engage in a flowing economy involving a coin and tokens backed by a chain that can actually process the amount of transactions necessary by the userbase. Trying to imagine steemit's userbase interacting with each other at btc or eth speeds is laughable, and the backlog would be so vast we'd post one day and hope we can be heard in hundreds of years.