It's a very bad idea to power down or sell Steem right now

Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser and this is not investment advice. These are my opinions based on what I've just seen on Github.

The current Steem is flawed and we all know it

First, the current version of Steem is very flawed. We all know about the problems. There are complaints about abuse of the reward pool, complaints about bots, complaints about how hard it is to earn a stable income from blogging. This is only going to keep getting worse unless participants have more ways to add value to Steem than mere blogging, curating, or being a witness/politician. The majority of participants on the Steem platform genuinely want to add value and want to increase the utility of Steem. Currently the cost of doing this is prohibitively high and this forces the majority of participants into the three main yet limited roles (blogger, curator, politician), which in my opinion is the main flaw.

The bots exist currently and are automating curation. These bots do not do a great job at it and many people complain that these bots upvote posts which "do not deserve" to be rewarded or perhaps not rewarded as much. This is a very subjective thing so I will not really go into which posts do or do not deserve this or that. What I will say is that when there is a very small limited pool, with only main ways to add value to Steem, and perhaps 250,000 or 500,000 people all trying to be bloggers, or curators, or politicians, this is not going to work. Not everyone should be a blogger, and even people who are doing well blogging today (myself included), may not be best suited to continue blogging into the future.

The problems we see with Steem today are solvable

The problem today is that the reward pool is limited, the ways of adding value to Steem is even more limited, and if you look at the math of it all, as there are more people who join then the new people will see the older generations and think of it like it's some kind of pyramid. The truth of the matter is that the only way to allow all participants to build their wealth while adding value to Steem is to expand the variety of ways participants can add value to Steem, expand the reward pool by creating an unlimited number of possible reward pools, and embrace diversification.

The answer is yes, there will be solutions. The answer to our problems in my opinion will be the smart media tokens. These resolutions, these solutions, these new roads being built, are all on Github for people who can read the code and understand the discussions. The specification for SMT is also important because it details how these problems can be solved.

Building wealth on Steem with SMTs

Wealth building is something many of us want. We want to contribute value to this community and be rewarded for it. We want to have our income grow while also seeing Steem improve. This is all possible to achieve with SMTs because SMTs are all about value flow. Wealth building is also about value flow, so this means it will be possible for more people to find a niche where they can contribute maximum value to the Steem ecosystem while being rewarded. It is very possible that many of us who are bloggers today (I'm talking about myself), may retire from blogging once SMTs come online and offer newer and better ways to add value.

SMTs are smart media tokens. These tokens much like pheromones can be used to encourage contribution of value. For example it may be possible to have ICOs over Steem which would allow entrepreneurship moves to take place. It is also possible that tokens can be used to start non profits for those who would like to focus on charitable activities. It will be possible to create all sorts of mini ecosystems where people who are "minnows" right now can actually have the advantages in some of these new ecosystems. We simply do not know what can or will be created in the future by way of SMTs.

Read the smart media token whitepaper here.

If I had the money right now I would aggressively buy Steem

Currently I don't have it but if I did then I see Steem is dramatically undervalued. SMTs will provide Steem with a huge utility boost and on top of this Steem also benefits greatly from Metcalfe's law in that the size of the community is there. So it's just a matter of increasing the number and kinds of connections between nodes. Right now what we can do on Steem is too limited and this is the only thing holding the ecosystem back. Adding greater utility to Steem means that eventually the price of Steem will be going up, possibly 100x from where it is right now, and quite possibly this year.

This all will depend on SMTs and what the participants decide to do with them. There are also the unknowns such as regulation but these unknowns can be navigated. Some flaws do remain with Steem such as the lack of privacy but even if Steem has zero privacy it still can have a lot of utility and become the main community for crypto. This status of being the main community for crypto is a big deal if achieved.

Final thoughts for now

The topic of building wealth with SMTs is going to be a topic I will focus more on once I know more about what SMTs will make possible. I do know that in theory depending on what developers do with it there could be a lot of opportunities there. To provide a basic example what would stop a team from setting up an SMT to create a decentralized Airbnb? Using a certain token a person could pay their rent over Steem. This token may not be the best example but the whitepaper does detail ways which would make it possible. Shared token rewards is also a significant feature because it means myself and others can form a community within a community. This community within a community could be like a tribe and rewards could be distributed based on membership according to the rules the members agreed to. This in my opinion may require a profit sharing functionality to be added to SMTs and to some extent this is planned.

For example reward sharing is going to be possible so that someone can post under a pseudonym and share the rewards of their posts with whomever they like. Between 8 and up to 256 accounts are the limit. This reward sharing in my opinion being limited to only 256 accounts seems kind of arbitrary and I would remove this limit if possible but this may be a hard limit due to the blockchain itself. Still if for every instance it's 256 accounts and there are unlimited possible future instances then you can do a lot just with that.

Finally SMTs can even work in symbiosis with something like Brave with it's BAT token. What about the smart oracles feature which was mentioned? These all are going to have high potential. What about the ability to burn SBD or SMTs, or lock them in smart contracts, or to allow advertisers to pay for our attention and share the profit with all who opt-in? All of this will be possible.

See the second part and solution to this post: https://steemit.com/smt/@dana-edwards/steem-must-improve-and-the-key-metric-for-that-improvement-is-utility