Why SMTs are not a distraction but a necessity

Smart Media Tokens are here. The whitepaper is out and people are talking about it.

Some are very enthusiastic and others are skeptical. I am here to share with you why it was absolutely essential for SMT to exist to prevent our developers from breaking away into their own chains and coins.

I love to talk with devs and here what they had to say

Devs are one of the most precious human capital we have on the STEEM blockchain. Ultimately, the future value of the STEEM token rest on their shoulders. Because of the current setting, without #SMT, the devs are on shaky ground and may even consider creating their own chains to accomplish what they want to accomplish. Let me explain...

So let's take the example of a very promising project by @jesta -> CHAINBB. @jesta poured countless number of hours to make this MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Once the app is running, he could consider bring it to the next level...but he faces this dilemma:

There are too many things outside of his control

If you want to build a long term business, you want to make sure to have as much control on your future as possible. You want to be able to control your development environment as much as possible. Some businesses may have completely different needs when it comes to inflation, reward curves, etc.

There is also the issue of hardforks...what if the witness decide to go to a different kind of reward curve and by doing so completely destroy your business model?

With SMTs, devs have control over a lot of the parameters without having to operate the infrastructure.

Too difficult to bootstrap

You see, Steemit had good development funds by having the ability to mine most coins at the beginning. That gave them a long enough runway to work on the infrastructure to allow the technology to scale.

That's great but what if @jesta wants to raise fund the same way to build a team and a business? He couldn't before UNLESS he started a new blockchain. Arbitrary reward from people posting was not enough.

Conclusion

I believe that now that we gave the ability for devs to control as much as possible on their environment and business model while giving them an ICO platform, we will be much less prone to have people making copy cat of STEEM in order for them to achieve their goals. I'm very happy of this new tech and I can't wait to see the value of STEEM soar to new height!