Today I learned about Smart Media Tokens (SMTs). I was chatting with @rycharde as he was helping me untangle a bit of confusion I was experiencing, and we ended up talking about the current steem volatility and he mentioned that

once SMTs start to work then STEEM will rise again, whatever happens to Steemit itself

That led me to do some quick research. I fond this post: Announcing Smart Media Tokens, and from there I went to the white paper. I learned that we are on the brink of some really powerful potential for any website to create its own tokens to incentivize desired behavior. This will be a big step forward for the steem blockchain, and should boost the value of steem regardless of what actually becomes of steemit. I think this will also potentially bring a lot more people to blockchain for reasons other than buying cryptocurrencies.

I think this was important to begin learning about because there are lot of different businesses that will be able to build on the platform. I am a member of @runningproject, and we are a small but active community, and there may be some cool ways we can use SMTs in that group.

I described my approach in the first part of my comment, but to reiterate, based on a conversation, I found SMT intro post, and followed the link on that post to the website and white paper. I haven't finished the white paper yet but will soon.

I will upvote this post in a couple of days when my power is back up! But resteeming now.