I'm not sure that doing the analysis on a value-basis over a period where the underlying value of steem is going from a particular low to a relative recovery is reasonable.
It would be far more sensible and illustrative to simply describe the value in terms of megavests and leave reification into token value aside. After all, that's not really what's important and not within the control of a given SMT – unless they start tinkering with the exchange of value between STEEM and the particular token, which is certainly doable but in no wise is it easy to deal with.
So, speaking purely in terms of the mechanical issuance on the blockchain, what does the number of megavests look like over the same period?
(And also, assuming that DLive was engaging purely in DTMT votes, wouldn't those who received those votes be rewarded in DTMT, allowing their future votes going forward to be done in DTMT? Which brings up an entirely different question of if people with the notional DTMT were also previously active on the steem blockchain, would they then have two separate pools of reward that they could vote from? Will content created for SMTs not also appear on the core steem blockchain? If so, that's going to get really complicated really quick for quite a lot of people. What happens if I up vote a DTube video and I have no DTMT? Does my steem value get automatically translated into DTMT? Does it simply get denied, even though we are on the same blockchain? If SMT mechanics don't occur on the steem blockchain, where are they occurring?
There are just way too many questions about this sort of thing.)
there are a lot of questions and i really would like more communication on SMTs
STEEM was selected as the base currency because my understanding of the whitepaper says that SMT's will be traded against STEEM on the internal exchange and is the base currency.
Also when you explain to someone about steemit, it is difficult enough for people to get their heads around STEEM and SBD without trying to also explain mega vests.
at first I was under the impression that only ''summary' data would be sent to the steemit blockchain from the SMT's and to be honest i am still unclear on how it works. The whitepaper does say that STEEM witnesses will be responsible which suggests that everything will pass thought steemit.
Yes people that get votes from DLive will have power to also vote and give rewards and these rewards are not included in the above analysis
all the other questions you have asked I can not answer. I would love to see a focus group set up by Steemit inc to allows us ask the necessary questions. from talking with some others there is a lot of confusion and even some FUD being spread.
The SMT's are late anyway, i thought it was the end of Q1 for release....
I believe that we all thought it would be the end of Q1 for release. Apparently we were all wrong. Not the first time that I've had to make that particular announcement when it comes to this sort of thing, but it never feels better. I always expect that I should never expect things like this to come out on time.
Choosing STEEM as the base currency for your description was the right choice. That's absolutely the number that we should be kicking around. It's that last step where we sort of skip over the fact that rates of conversion are variable, even more variable than the internal value of the tokens in question, where I think the problem gets harder for us to actually explain.
Pegging things to SBD? Pretty much a recipe for people to completely misunderstand what you're talking about. Keeping to just STEEM and avoiding any appearance of a $? That's going to always be better – and will lead to the inevitable question which is best posed by whoever you're talking to, "so – how much is that actually worth in real money?"
That's where you get to talk about the fact that the value of an individual token of STEAM can vary pretty aggressively, but that is a secondary concern (for the most part) compared to just getting a handle on how the token itself will function.
I also received the belief that all SMT activity would be going through the steem blockchain and witness architecture, which made me wonder what SMT activity would look like on Steemit or Busy or chainBB, since they all backend for display on the steem blockchain itself. Will SMT transfers, posts, and even SMT-based communities be visible at an activity level on the steem blockchain? What will that even look like? Is it going to be comprehensible? Is that kind of traffic going to force those of us who have been using the steem blockchain through one of these pre-SMT interfaces to move off of them into smarter interfaces which know how to filter out SMT activity?
I really just want to know how we, as users, are supposed to be interfacing with this really huge change in the way that the entire architecture communicates in the open. What will it look like?
We don't get any real mockups of designs or processes for something so elemental and constantly a part of the process of engaging on the platform. That's the sort of thing that makes me more than a little skeptical and more than a little nervous.
I would love a focus group. At best, what I expect to see is a yes-man seated report from some far-off exotic location where everyone tells me repeatedly that "everything is fine," "there are some big players on board," "and we'll have more details when we get back from wining and dining exotic and beautiful women, shaking babies, and kissing hands." Nothing about actual process, how this thing is supposed to actually work for us, or anything that we can actually make use of.
I can imagine a dozen ways that SMTs could work. I'm sure none of them come close to the frustration I'll feel when I find out how SMTs do work.
But I want to know. This is kind of a big deal. We already have one SMT (or at least what pretends to be an SMT) in its final round of ICO (APPICS). As far as I can tell, we can't even answer the questions I just laid out when it comes to them, and we should be able to.
So I guess I get to be the token anti-hype guy or token-cynic guy or whatever it is I am around here in the community. I am pretty deeply dubious.
I think the APPICS ico has caused a lot of the confusion and FUD in the first place. Most of the main developers seem to know how its going to work, but for some reason it all seem hush hush to me after that. I have had my suspicions that this is being done on purpose to give existing top players an advantage over others, but that's a different conversation all together.
The assumption that we on the consumer side have kind of been driven to is that APPICS is going to be this entirely separate content world which is primarily focused on mobile devices. Which would be fine, except that an intelligent person then goes on to ask, "but what does that mean for the original steem blockchain?"
And then we cycle into all of the questions that I just asked previously about SMTs.
The APPICS ICO was interesting to me (not necessarily in a good way) because of the multistage nature of the release. The early phase had a 20% price cut and as things went along it dropped to 10% and then 5%. If I were trying to sell the most of the thing before a due date, that would be the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I don't want to get everyone in at the beginning of my sales, I want to push them to get in right before the drop, keeping excitement high and word-of-mouth really solid once I go live. Instead, what they've done seems to communicate exactly the opposite, that they wanted everyone to get in early while the hype over nothing that they could see was high and then gently screw harder the people who came in via word-of-mouth or people who were excited to get in on a really cheap ICO (comparatively).
If we are to judge people by what they do and not what they say – what they do seems kind of shady.
And again with APPICS, we have a situation where they don't really talk much about the actual process of using the platform. They've given a few show and tells, but from the footage that I've seen, the actual interaction doesn't seem to be offering anything more than a very basic Instagram or Facebook post except that people can drop a steem vote on it. Hades only knows what their beneficiary cut is, or how their token will interact with the rest of the steem blockchain, or how their content will appear in the steem blockchain or anything else.
If they are spinning off a new token just to back a prettier mobile interface for the steem BC, I suppose that's okay, but it feels like a waste of an entire coin hype cycle.
One of the things that, as a game designer of multiplayer games and even role-playing games, I look at when considering whether or not to add a new currency to the game is whether or not you can buy something different with it. If you can't, there's no real reason for that extra bit of record keeping.
I know you've probably been following APPICS a lot more closely that I have, so if they aren't making much of an impression on you, I suspect that they're falling down on the job.
The SMTs are just not that impressive, useful, or needed, as far as I can tell right now. They almost feel as though they are a tacked on technology to compete with ERC20 – which would be fine if they actually conveyed an element of value like an ERC20.
Use cases. We need decent use cases. Ones which seem to be written from the position of "how will users actually use this thing?"
I'm not holding my breath. That never ends well.