Developing Steem to Its Fullest Potential - Why SMTs are Crucial, and Steemit.com Isn't So Important

SMTs are steem’s most important feature ever - and steemit.com is its least important one.

How’s that for a thesis statement? Hear me out on this one.

The Power of Long-Term Thinking

Short-term gains and long-term success are often at odds with each other. We all know that feeling good today doesn’t automatically mean you are making smart decisions for the future.

My favorite saying relates to this: “We overestimate what we can do in a day but underestimate what we can do in a few years.”

In my opinion, steemit.com is more on the "short-term" side of things. I believe it is a proof-of-concept for the steem blockchain, not the final product. To reach our full potential and change the world with steem, we must think much larger than steemit itself.

The Long-Term Approach to Building a World-Class Blockchain

In my opinion, the recent announcement of Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) has received a lot of unfair criticism.

Here are the most common critiques:

(1) SMTs are a distraction from developing the Steemit website
(2) SMTs are too complicated for most people to understand.

Let’s take a look at these two ideas.

Criticism #1: SMTs are a distraction from steemit website development.

This idea seems absolutely backwards to me. In my view, steemit website development is a distraction from SMT development.

Anybody can build a front-end for the steem blockchain. In fact, busy.org offers a viable alternative interface that anybody can use if they aren’t satisfied with the steemit front-end. So what’s the point in the core developers focusing on user interface features?

The whole point of the steem blockchain is that it should power a large ecosystem of websites and social media communities. Steemit is a proof-of-concept, not the killer application.

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This is where long-term and short-term thinking become opposite. In the short term, many users want to see flashy new steemit.com features and watch the alexa ranking go up. Those would be nice, but they aren't the key tasks in front of us.

Remember this: Aside from bitcoin, Ethereum is the most valuable and popular blockchain, and it’s mostly thanks to the ERC-20 token model. Steem is following suit by building its own ICO / token creation model - a superior model to what ethereum can offer for many applications. That is so much more important than building a single social media community.

Criticism #2: SMTs are too complicated and will turn away new users.

Smart Media Tokens are hard to understand from a development perspective. But, is this such a bad thing?

I’m not surprised that the details of SMTs are a bit difficult to grasp. After all, creating an SMT means you are launching your own digital currency. I don’t think “making this simple and easy” is necessarily the top priority - stability and security are what matter most.

The first time you heard about bitcoin - did you understand it? I didn’t. It took me months of research to grasp what a blockchain even was, especially since I came from a non-technical background.

But what about the new users? Will they be turned away by this complexity? I don’t think so, because they don’t need to understand SMTs. They just need to know that digital currency exists, and that you can earn it by posting content.

“Hey, you can earn real money on this platform.” That’s all that matters. Everything else is extra detail, and as steem + SMTs become more prevalent, the skepticism barrier will be easier to overcome.

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Anybody who has used reddit can understand steemit in 15 seconds - “It’s reddit, except upvotes give you money. It’s completely free to use, you don’t need to pay money to get in. Honestly, just try it for a few days and then start to learn about the details after that.”

The same thing applies anywhere - if The New York Times starts issuing NYTCoin for its commenters, those people will have exactly one question: How do I spend this? As long as they can easily cash out tokens for dollars, the rest will work itself out.

What do you think?

I suspect that some steemians will not be so happy with my opinions here. These are contentious subjects, with many opposing viewpoints at the table.

What do you think? Where do you disagree with me? Please let me know in the comments so we can have a healthy discussion about it.