SMTs Release Dates!
UPDATE, March 11th, 2019: We have delayed the release of SMTs to focus on MIRA, which is software that leverages state-of-the-art database technology developed by Facebook to move the blockchain from RAM to commodity hardware. We expect the release of SMTs to dramatically increase the amount of transactions made to our blockchain (already one of the most used) and as the team behind the largest blockchain application in the world, we understand that the most urgent scaling consideration is not transaction throughput, but the cost of operating high-traffic nodes. That's why it's critical that we complete work on MIRA before releasing SMTs. That being said, much of the work on SMTs is already complete. Be sure to follow @steemitblog if you would like to remain updated on our progress.
Hello Steemians! We have some exciting news to share.
We are about to put the finishing touches on Hardfork 20, thanks to our core development team and your thoughtful suggestions and review. As a result, we can now focus on delivering Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) to you.
SMTs Release Date
We’re happy to announce and commit to a release of the TestNet in January 2019 along with a release and launch of the protocol on the MainNet in March 2019:
January 15, 2019 - SMT development complete and live on the TestNet.
March 24, 2019 - SMT fully released and live on the Steem Blockchain. ~~
See update above.
What are SMTs?
Smart Media Tokens are a token-launching protocol similar to ERC20s on Ethereum, but with all the state-of-the-properties enabled by the Steem blockchain, like three-second fee-less transfers. SMTs enable anyone to launch their own STEEM-like token with customizable features including Founders Tokens, Token Emission Rates, Proof-of-Brain, ICO Smart Contracts, and more.
A Post-SMT World
After the launch of SMTs, anyone in the world will be able to create their own cryptocurrency with industry-leading capabilities, and immediate access to the largest cryptocurrency community in the world. To learn more about Smart Media Tokens, check out the SMT whitepaper at https://smt.steem.io.
Steem Blockchain Team
Oh geez. In my opinion better not to announce release dates at all if they are in 2019. It's not what people want to see at this time and will crash the price of Steem.
What people (and the market) want to see is a release of SMT sometime in 2018. I would honestly consider retracting this post because of the impact it could have on the market and Steem price which already is floundering.
How about don't announce any launch dates or release dates until the year it's going to be released. If it's more than 6 months away and we are in a bear market it's a forever away.
I'd rather see firm dates that are a ways out but can/will actually get met, than vague promises of "soon" or "hopefully sometime this year". Even though 2019 is further out than many have hoped, it sounds like by very early 2019 (January) the protocol will be to a point that people can start playing around with it and writing SMT-based code. I think that is very good news!
I would agree with Tim. We are really only talking a quarter away. This has been on the roadmap for a while. If you follow the project on GitHub the check-in activity is up and the progress is happening. This is fantastic news! I'm eagerly awaiting the testnet. Time to start getting excited.
Yes. I believe we have been some variation on "soon" for nearly two years now!
Well in just 4-5 months, boom. That is fast.
Agreed, Tim. It looks like people have gotten really into hating on the platform even when announcements are positive... And yet they're still here...
Steem is stuck in the overall trend of the alt coin market and One announcement is not going to change the course of an entire bear market even if they had said 2018. All coins have been going down.
Yes I'd prefer to see 2018 as would we all. However I'd rather see hivemind first.
I'd like to see some people analyse how other companies using the steem blockchain with their own currency will impact the price of steem.
Okay but they said in this post they want to focus on SMTs. They did not mention Hive Mind coming in 2018 or anything for 2018. Big difference.
Also the problem with Steem is it can't hold value. It's literally leaking BTC value on a daily basis and now it's to the point that the reward pool is so small that it's not just unsustainable but even the community now is complaining about it. I would say the Steem developers need to do something to make Steem a better store of value while they work on SMTs.
Yes, exactly this - there should be work on fixing the economic incentives to make it better to hold SP. Better to buy SP for profitable content curation than buy SP to profit from trading votes. Why has this little bug been left on for so long?
Hivemind is a non-consensus application layer, that is independent of the blockchain code. From what I've heard, the two projects are independent and being worked on in parallel. SMTs will be the next big "blockchain" development, but that should not mean anything in regards to Hivemind development slowing down.
I would start with mixing some promoted post on the trending page
That is a good idea. A lot can and needs to be done honestly. They can do this simultaneously while building SMTs. Build the store of value for Steem whilst building SMTs.
It's following the market trend is it not? In fact the other day it crashed 10% while the majority of coins on binance went down closer to 20% ... i don't want it to go down. But I just don't think one announcement can be stronger than the general market cycle. Traders these days are trading trends not investing long term off of awesome news. (wish they were of course)
That is not the point though. The point is Steem has a community and ecosystem bigger than probably all the top 10 platforms combined yet isn't in the top 10.
Oh i didn't realize that was your point. #noted
Bitshares has a higher market cap than Steem. Can you believe that? Not saying Bitshares isn't good tech but the Steem community has over a million accounts. Even notorious sh*tcon Dogecoin has a higher market cap.
now you know what is undervalued. It is unbelievable that even Dogecoin has a higher market cap! Perfect buy time.
The lack of news about Hivemind worries me. While both HF20 and this post are very welcome, do they imply that communities have been pushed down the road, and will arrive later than SMTs? Or will there be a separate announcement?
(repeat of a comment I replied to a similar question)
Hivemind is a non-consensus application layer, that is independent of the blockchain code. From what I've heard, the two projects are independent and being worked on in parallel. SMTs will be the next big "blockchain" development, but that should not mean anything in regards to Hivemind development slowing down.
This alleviates my concerns, thank you.
I strongly disagree with your statements here. The announcement does not have a negative impact on the market whatsoever. The market is still so young that valueations of Alts strongly depend on the value of BTC.
Most altcoins dropped 90% (so did STEEM from 9 to .90) This all happend before the announcment, not after.
If you cannot wait until mid 2019 for the price to explode again, then please power down now.
I honestly believe that STEEM dropping to 50 cents or below is the best thing that could happen. This is a life changing opportunity for many people. If you don't want to buy more when the market is in crisis mode, that's your issues.
Ha, young? It's been since 2016. EOS is younger but look at it's price? What about other projects like Tron? Can we not make excuses for the poor market performance of Steem?
Even if you disagree with my opinion on the announcement it is objective fact that Steem under performs in the market chronically.
Buy with what? Bitcoin? I don't see others doing that. Show me where people are trading Bitcoin for Steem because if that were happening the Steem to Bitcoin price would be going up not down.
lol. How old are you? 24? A new market needs at least 8-12 years to be considered mature.
Don't you remember the early days of the internet, or pcs in general or dotcom campanies? They were laughed upon for many years in the beginning. Look where it has come to now. The same exact thing will happen with cryptos in a few years. Steem is not even a toddler yet... 2 year old blockchain with a developer team of 20 people at max.
Bitcoin is over 10 years old. Steem you are saying needs 8-12 years? You mean like Myspace? We don't have 8-12 years in a competitive market. I'm with you that Steem is important but I think more emphasis needs to be put on making Steem profitable/sustainable.
Cryptos we all agree on anyway so no one is going to debate that here. But I also think cryptos (including altcoins) should focus or put emphasis on making sure that their platforms or their products not only produce value but actually create demand for the token so that the ecosystem can grow.
Developers are great but only can take a social network so far. I can write code myself but there are more things to do than write code. Most people who write code don't only write code.
I was a part of those early days. I was also a part of the early days of peer to peer, of crypto, etc. My point is that just like with Dot Com there was a time when many companies existed with no emphasis on profit for the shareholders. What happened to those companies and which ones survived until now?
I get your point about sharholder value, but in the beginning you were talking about how waiting another seven months for SMTs seemed unbearable or some kind of horrible for you as a shareholder who is only earning 20 bucks per day right now.
No, I always expected a wait. But I do think if you promise shareholders (Q4 2018) and then announce a delay (Q1 2019 testnet) then of course it could spook the market. It's so far though not having much impact one way or the other on the Steem price.
I also never said it's "horrible for me" or said I earn $20 a day; you came up with that. But sure, I would say the more Steem Holders can earn the more people will want to hold. Not just earn from holding Steem but from posting, the reward pool, or any other kind of interaction with the platform. The whole point of holding a token is either you think it's going to go up over time or you want to use it to earn $ or do something productive.
Steem allows people to add value currently but the reward pool isn't growing. As a result the community (not just me) is complaining. They say the reward pool is being exploited, or blame it on bots, but the truth is the reward pool hasn't been growing. Vote selling and bots are a separate issue but connected.
And one of the main problems is retention. People who join Steem post a few times and then leave when they see $1 or so as their reward. It's because the reward pool is shrinking and so the whole situation is unsustainable no matter what you do.
So while there are more accounts than ever (people tend to create accounts when it's a bull market because the rewards are higher) it would indicate to me that if the rewards are higher the rate of growth for Steem would increase.
So we look at it from that perspective and we can see the larger the reward pool the faster the growth of the whole ecosystem for everyone. SMTs can't come soon enough but what to do while we wait for SMTs?
What is the plan after HF20? No ideas to solve the demand problems? Even putting promoted posts on trending could help.
SMTs and communities have unbelievable potential in the mid to longterm. But with only 60k active users u can't expect miracles over night. The tokenization of forums and chats of giant websites could revolutionize the web as we know it.
Next thing that needs to be focused on will be scaling though. To run a full node is unbearably expensive now, because it needs 1 TB of RAM, that's insane.
No. You don't seem to understand how the reward pool works. Actually we recently hit a new alltime high. Never have been more tokens paid out before. Don't get confused with all the SBD that was printed (and worth 5$ each). It is just that the tokens are worth so much less right now that it seems unattractive. When you say reward pool you actually are talking about the worth of the tokens paid out (in Dollars). Yes, we had 5million before, and yes it is now down to 737.000 again. So we lost 85% of that, too. But it will rise again when BTC rises, because STEEM rise with it.
check out steem.supply to see how the reward pool grows and shrinks independently from the worth in Dollars (of it).
I strongly disagree. I think most weren't actually thinking they would get SMTs done, possibly ever. Having a date is extremely bullish, even if it is further out than most would like.
Yes man..atleast we now have a parameter for judging pass/fail...
I like how the operator didn't even flinch after that one move.
The confidence.
Crash the price of Steem, what on earth are you talking about?
This is good news, fantastic news in fact. Now we have a set date for launch and it's only a few months away.
This is a cause for celebration, not pessimism.
Bizarre. Only in crypto can a project announce a delay and be celebrated. If Tesla announces a delay the shareholders get nervous. Truth is this is a delay from the original roadmap. It is true that the original roadmap was never set in stone but this "setting in stone" now puts the team in a position where if they miss this upcoming date what will the community say?
Thanks for the feedback, @dana-edwards, it's always appreciated. We felt it was important to give developers considering launching an SMT as much notice as possible. We've spent the last year growing and totally reorganizing our engineering teams specifically so that we could generate an accurate forecast for the release of products. Once engineering felt confident it had generated an accurate timeline, we felt it was more important to let everyone know that information.
valid reasoning in my opinion. Seems like companies would need a few months.
However with that said I bet they'd be ready for a testnet in 2-3 months ;) haha
We'd certainly rather they be ready sooner, but we're confident that this deliverable is based on the max potential velocity. This isn't the type of thing that you can just accelerate with more hires. No one else is even working on something like this, let alone releasing a timeline.
No real surprise here... A announcement for SMTs which won't happen until 2019 (who knows when), meanwhile there are still serious scaling issues that need to be solved for the steem platform. Why not devote time to making it so that full nodes do not require almost 1TB of RAM to run? That doesn't seem to be a priority despite the fact that it would make the technology miles and miles more desirable then SMTs since the features all require better scalability. Steem desperately needs sharding or some kind of asynchronous system.
I don't think that fixing a issue that only affects witnesses and can be easily fixed adding RAM should slow down the development of a feature that will allow a huge number of new use cases
It doesn't only affect witnesses. Any application that runs on top of the blockchain is affected by this issue. The only way to access the RPC of the steem blockchain is to use a Full Node. Any performance issues that come from this lack of scaling proliferate down to all of the users. It makes developing for the platform harder as well when the API and RPC are not stable. If they implement SMTs on this platform as it is it will cause tons of issues for all of the end users because the platform doesn't scale.
Just consider these numbers for a moment... According to the latest steemit statistics post the platform hosts between 50 and 60k concurrent active users and a full node on the blockchain requires almost 1 TB of RAM to run smoothly. Bitcoin, the largest blockchain in the world is currently supporting 25 million wallets (and for the sake of argument, let us just say that 5 million of them are active users on a daily basis). A full Bitcoin node requires only 2 gigs of ram to run properly. Bitcoin cash which also has its own blog type platform, memo.cash, also only requires roughly 2-4 gigs of ram to run a full node. While admittedly none of these platforms are identical with one another in how they operate, the cost of performance vs the amount of users supported is absurd.
Id rather see a date but wow the release talk was like a year ago and we still gotta wait forever it was a bit early talking about it 8 -10 months ago
True, but still it seems like an interesting project...
Bro, that's a pretty short time. Seven months sounds pretty ambitious to me. But I'm still kinda new I guess...
How can committing to a date be a bad thing???
Is not what you were hopping for?? but at least now you have a timeline to looking forward for.
I don't really like hard dates. I would say the same about setting hard dates with Tauchain which people know I'm interested in as well. It's usually not a good idea to set a release date as it creates expectations. Also when you didn't meet the previous expectations people might not want to hear your new updated release schedule which is a year late.
This same thing happened with Ethereum Casper and look at the Ethereum price. So I'm assuming the market will respond in a similar manner as it did to Ethereum but I could be wrong.
Sorry to say that but the develpment is too slow compared to the competition. It will not end well if we don't accelerate. Very disappointed.
What are you comparing this to, if I may ask?
The competition is EOS I assume.
This is super exciting! Wanna do an interview with me @ned? I'd love to cover the story!
As founder of @actifit - SMT for Rewarding Fitness Activity, we can't wait to get more hands on experience on SMTs. Those dates are a great start, we would preferably want more details from Steemit inc core team on exact expectations and final plans.
There should be a detailed ( even if private) debrief for the early SMT adopters so they can plan and adapt accordingly for the already running apps.
Hey Mcfarhat bro. I'm yet to know much about activity. I'm going to download it now and see how it works
sure ! It's all about rewarding people for being active :)
Join us on discord if you need any help.
More information will certainly be coming! This is just the beginning! You'll be getting a lot more info on SMTs as we move towards these release dates
Counting on you guys, please don't let us down.
We appreciate your support. We promise to not let you down! We're in this for the long haul. We've been at it for 2 plus years, which is a lot more than most blockchain projects can say and we're still just as passionate about bringing this revolutionary technology to the masses as ever. We have our plan and we're sticking to it!
@andrarchy for president 2020
Thanks! we would definitely be looking forward to those the soonest, particularly as many aspects of our token distribution plans could be affected by how SMTs will function.
@andrarchy good news, I am going to go through the whitepaper again, I actually forgot about SMT's. Thanks!
A couple of months seem a long time to go, congrats!!! Long life SMTs.
I wish it were a couple of months .I would be excited if they said SMTs launch in a couple of months but ven I think maybe that is unrealistic. I think if they can launch test net before the end of 2018 that would be fantastic. But I also understand Jan-March 2019 is around the time Ethereum will be coming with Casper.
You guys are working hard that end and there are people out there that see that and know what it takes to do what your doing. thank you deeply for the efforts and the great changes you have already made in blockchain and in people lives on steemit for making such a great idea into reality. I hope great success for SMT and for Steemit. People are greedy inside, we been programmed this way. People want more and more quicker and quicker and sometimes forget all those people really busting there asses with sleepless nights to make these incredible things happen. Its easier for some to critique and bait vs. encourage and uplift.
Hmmmm.... it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds.
@remind-me on 16 January 2019
Hey @onealfa, I will notify you on January 16th 2019, 12:00:00 pm (UTC)
Later! ( read more... )
good idea! @remind-me on 16 January 2019
Hey @mountainjewel, I will notify you on January 16th 2019, 12:00:00 pm (UTC)
Later! ( read more... )
Hi @mountainjewel!
You asked me in this comment to create a reminder.
It seems the time has passed!
Hi @onealfa!
You asked me in this comment to create a reminder.
It seems the time has passed!
Thanks for listening to our feedback and only announcing dates and features when you're absolutely certain about them. Of course, you'll have to deliver, but for the first time, I feel confident that you will.
Wow, this is exciting! There are many incoming coins that will use steem blockchain and this will surely boost the steem soon. 🤗
The most frequently asked question has now been answered, thanks for that! I guess you couldn't hear it any longer either :-))
I was betting you'd announce the date at Steemfest (gladly not putting any money on it.) Great to know you proved me wrong.
These are going to be 5 tough months for you, hope you've got enough Red Bull in the fridge...:-)
All the best!