Hello @dana-edwards,
I apologize for my late reply. I feel that earning into a program through account qualification would be the best solution to ensure that people are genuinely participating and are not trying to deceive others. The MLM you describe that each SMT could do is pretty sound, along with the aforementioned lock up of investment/funds you've described above.
As long as there is no interest to be gained in referring, or having it capped out at a certain amount would ensure not to overrun budget. This is overall a pretty good idea to help bring more value to STEEM.
Great job!
shello
The commission rate needs to be dynamically adjusting by algorithm.
The rate is in dollars and this would have to be variable rate. The budget also would be in dollars and would be variable based on the token price. So just at 1 BTC isn't worth more or less than 1 BTC, but that 1 BTC is always changing in how much it is worth in dollars, the budget also would be tokens and those tokens would always change in how much they are worth in dollars if they choose to use a percentage of their SMTs as "budget". They could also use Steem Dollars as "budget" and have a fixed amount in dollars.
In this way the issuer of the SMT would have the flexibility to either have a fixed budget in dollars or a dynamically adjusting budget in tokens, but in any case the percentages of commissions should be determined by algorithm not by people.
In this way the humans never have to be concerned about managing the budget for marketing. The budget will be self managing and the percentages dynamically changing from week to week or day to day.
A sliding scale based on market price is pretty standard protocol, my bad- You right. What I thought was the kicker here is that the budget could also be factored as a set amount in SBD, I feel like that's actually a really good application of the currency, since Steem-backed Dollars are always supposed to be close to $1 USD.
Overall, I can see you did a lot of research and thought hard on the different ways SMTs can be used for referrals. The people who decide to make a token, wouldn't be stuck running their systems all the same way, and each program could be better tailored to the community it will represent.
I really hope they do this, it would help raise the value by a lot.