Ned really likes conceptual work. Which is great, I do too! But you can't really take them as signs that that thing is coming the way he talks about it. That's not necessarily inappropriate in this case, as SMTs are Hardfork 22 at the earliest, and that's probably next summer. (#21 is Hivemind.)
I should have mentioned that estimating how long things take not my strong side is.
But it would still be interesting to get some feedback from Steemit Inc regarding your date estimation. @andrarchy?
Anyway, thinking more about how this fits with my proposal, maybe I'm extrapolating what you're saying too much here, and please say so. But it sounds like what you would like is to keep the PoS function of Steem running but remove the content voting system from Steem entirely and migrate it to a new SMT.
Don't worry, what you're saying is valid.
What I would like to see and what is possible are two different shoes. But the first step is always writing down the optimal situation. And that's, what my goal was with this post.
I'm not convinced that stake-weighted voting fundamentally doesn't work, either. I think it's very appealing to have a vote that gains value based on how much effort you've invested here and how much you've contributed. That may be weighted farther toward external financial power than it would ideally be, and certainly the distribution of power is currently a mess, but I don't think those are insoluble problems.
Stake-weighted voting has value, but I'd rather see it in closed communities - for example if a company were to have a community / SMT with own rewards pool. In that case, the CEO should have a bigger voice than an intern.
My vision of Steem five years from now is one where there's a large population of established users with $1-$10 votes who can collectively guide the growth of the content and the community.
With all respect, 5 years is a long time and we should ideally reach that goal in 1-2 years. But again, my time estimation isn't the best ;)
If Steem Inc. wanted to do it we could have that in months. Even without busting out the ninja-mined stake, if they wanted to give @themesopotamians one of those million-SP delegations I could make 3000 dolphins a year.
Without their support it's going to take longer. I'm conservative on the five year estimate because it's just taking into account the projects that are active and communicative right now. Hopefully we will also be growing.
Maybe @kpine has a different estimate, it seems like he might be doing similar things to what I am with much more power and much less talking about it. I haven't included him because I don't really know.