Interesting to hear a confirmation to my idea that using STEEM would best be left to function as a utility token for voting for witnesses and renting out Resource Credits. That's my long-term vision for STEEM anyway. All curation could be done using SMTs in communities where the distributions of the tokens used could be much more even or concentrated into the app owners who'd be genuinely motivated to reward the highest quality content the most.
I'm beginning to think that using the base layer tokens for curation is a failure. That doesn't need to mean Steem as a whole is a failure. Steem has feeless transactions for users and apps going for it. It's also fast and developer-friendly.
Well, we have similar ideas, only, I think SMTs are nothing but buzz. I think it is a mistake for Steem to try to be the social Ethereum, as it seems every blockchain is trying to be Ethereum now. Even Bitcoin Cash is trying to play the token game.
Don't get me wrong, token creation is very valuable, but only a very small number of SMTs will manage to have an economic value. The launch of SMTs would pump STEEM price but then it would experience an unwind similar to Ethereum. I argue that Steem has a different value.
The Steem blockchain was designed to be the backend to future blog and social frontends. In that world, STEEM would be a universal currency on all those sites. No SMT will ever be able to do that.
What I am suggesting is that STEEM holders act like miners, generating resource credits with their stake and renting it out to community administrators and bloggers. The more SP you have the more RCs you can sell. But as for the Steem inflation or reward pool, I would hand the distribution of that over to the "wisdom of the crowd" with equal weighted voting.
This would solve many problems. It solves: Bidbots, Self-voting, reward pool "milking" and downvote harassment from wealthy accounts.
SMTs are a good idea, but if they were the main reward, honestly, I would say Steem would end up going nowhere. Steem needs a universal currency that can be used throughout the web and I believe what everyone is going to want to earn is STEEM itself or at least SBD.
I don't find tokenization a problem in the least. A few dozen have already been created on Steem-Engine. The PAL token seems to be working fine. Its USD value is something like 14 cents at the moment.
Anyone could create as many accounts as they wished and game the system that way. This is why Voice has an account creation system where all accounts must be associated with a hash of a set of unique biometrical data acting as Proof-of-Life. That is the only way to create an account-based system that cannot be trivially gamed.
They can only game the system because RCs are used to create accounts. The trick is to separate the incentives of investors and content curation. Burning STEEM to create accounts is an effective method for doing it, but is problematic for on-boarding. The bio hash concept is fairly good, but Minds.com uses a phone number. The phone number idea is my favorite, because you can identify the burner numbers, requiring the individual to actually use their rule phone number. Its not perfect, but it is helpful.
Alternatively, what if we beefed up the reputation system? We could make a person's vote value be based on the account's reputation level. Right now reputations are worthless digits next to a name, but the old Silkroad black market taught a valuable lesson: if the reputation system is crucial people behave themselves.
I think creating a better reputation system could be a worthwhile endeavor. But I'm afraid that, too, would be gameable using off-chain money transfers to buy into a higher reputation if it depended on endorsements. On the other hand, that would, after all, put money into the pockets of the little guy.