STEEM Community Tokens
Today we had a talk with @ned over on SteemSpeak about Community Tokens.
It's a little bit like an idea that @mughat and I were thinking about. Here are our previous suggestions:
Keep in mind that back then, we were calling it "sub-steem" as a naming convention to tie in how Reddit works. And the core functionality we were looking for had to do with issuing tokens.
Since then, Steemit, Inc. has been doing some heavy development on Communities, which has many of the non-token features we were looking for.
But the token is key and I'm very happy that they're looking to expand into adopting tokens.
User Issued Assets
At its core, a Community Token is like a UIA (User Issued Asset). But, as Ned pointed out in the talk, in order to launch a UIA, you must have some kind of product (or the promise of a product). Otherwise, why are you issuing an asset?
Can you launch a UIA without a product? Sure, it's flexible enough for that. And there are plenty of examples. But it's not that compelling.
Contrast that with Community Tokens. These tokens, issued on the STEEM blockchain, will have an instant product: The Community. They'll have a distribution through their own reward pool. They'll have value by trading against STEEM.
Market
Does this mean that STEEM will have all of the trading pairs that BitShares has? My theory is no. You will probably only trade against STEEM and maybe SBD. There probably won't be any other (non-community) assets. Why? Because this will require external price feeds and other required features associate with Smart Coins. I just don't see this happening in the first round of development.
But that's ok. We only need STEEM pairs. This will greatly benefit the platform. It will create demand for STEEM in order to facilitate trades between other community tokens.
If these token can be exchanged for BTC ( which i suspect will be) then what's the point of STEEM?
Tokens on ETH brings value because they use eth as fee to execute contract but on STEEM there is no fee .
I suspect it would have something to do with the content reward splitting feature. If 100 community tokens are issued for what becomes a very active community, let's say that community takes 2% of rewards generated by content posted within it. If you grab one token early you'd earn .02% of all the rewards generated by perhaps millions of users in perpetuity.
And of course major exchanges don't list many UIA, so STEEM would probably be a needed currency to transact in these tokens. As the article mentions, pairings beyond STEEM and SBD could be unwieldy for so many possible tokens.
What are you refering to when you say UIA? do you mean IOU? If so these tokens are not IOU,
they will be currencies of their own and if communities can do everything we do without using steem then I don't see why they will be using steem and how it is going stay relevant.
I don't think it would be unwieldy,how so? I think it would be trivial to add pairing with BTC. Another thing is that these tokens will evolve and will be directly competing with steem because they will effectively doing the same thing. In my opinion they should be careful implementing this unless they have a concrete and solid plan to keep the STEEM token valuable.
Sorry, UIA stands for user issued asset, basically tokens that can be created by anyone on blockchains like OpenLedger or Ethereum.
The way I'm envisioning it is that these tokens simply convey ownership and probably governance rights for communities. They're the trustless blockchain manner of managing things. Instead of pairing up with a few friends and scratching out a paper that says you each own 25%, you create 1000 tokens and give each founder 250.
The community should still pull from the Steem rewards pool, it'll be Steem based, creating tokens/paying for community bandwidth should cost Steem. I see tokens as share certificates.
It's similar to the recent offering of the ZAAPL token. Token holders stand to gain dividends or share appreciation solely on the volume of activity and content passing through their community. ZAAPL does nothing to detract from STEEM, only enhance it.
I could be wrong but from what I understood these tokens will have their own reward pool which is why I was a bit concerned.
If the influence and all the money distribution is done with steem I have no problem with these tokens but like i said my understanding was that for example food will have a foodcoin and people will power up their foodcoin to get more influence within the food community. Please correct If I'm wrong.
STEEM would be the base token layer - it's required to hold some amount of Steem Power to transact freely - or a fee must be paid. Boiling the economics down, Steem as bandwidth allowance begins to look similar to Eth's gas but with more ease of use.
Yeah that's how steem account are created but this is not real demand it's a one off thing, it's basically buying a phone not the top up card.
What is the demand for steem going to be in the future when everyone uses comic coin power, news coin power, sports coin power,etc.. what uses cases for steem will be left?
If these tokens were only exchangeable for steem then steem would be sort of the backing/reserve currency of all these community coins and as such would be very valuable but people are going to buy and sell them with bitcoin because bitcoin is the reserve currency. Steem would just become an enabler with no value.
Trading directly for BTC is a very complicated feature. It would require either a pegged asset on the STEEM blockchain (unlikely) or getting the token onto an external exchange (unlikely). So STEEM will always be important.
My opinion is that if there is demand, these tokens will be added. Most of the ETH tokens are trading for ETH and BTC, they could have chosen to only restrict it to ETH but there is more demand in BTC so both pair are available. With the negative sentiment towards altcoins in the BTC community, you can bet if steem becomes huge they will beg exchanges to add BTC trading pair.
The idea of tokens is interesting but there needs to be a mecanism to protect steem power holders and retain the value and utility of steem.
Since each token would have their own reward pool, there would be less pressure on the STEEM reward pool. As such, people who focus only on the STEEM reward pool will indirectly benefit from the existence of many other tokens.
This is because payouts in those other tokens won't crowd into each other. They would be segmented.
I see what you're saying about high-demand tokens. Let's imagine that the community creates a
CNCommunity Token for the Chinese community.Let's also imagine that
CNtoken is incredibly popular and it's the second largest token next to STEEM itself. So poloniex opens a trading pair forBTC/CN.The interesting thing about that situation is that it creates an arbitrage opportunity. People with a lot of STEEM might buy
CNinternally so they can sell it on poloniex, creating demand forCN. If there's enough volume, it would cycle back and forth, rather than just go one way perpetually.Meaning, once the pressure to arbitrage
CNin one direction finds equilibrium, it will go in the other direction for a while, creating demand for STEEM.The equilibrum you speak of won't protect steem power holders as the CN community will take a lot of market share away from steem still. Many projects will develop around this token and thus it will be directly competing with steem.
@ned and the devs at steemit @vandeberg,etc..need to make sure that these tokens can only be bought and sold with steem. Maybe a mecanism like rootstock where you can exchange RSK for BTC and back would guarantee that these tokens are only redeemable for STEEM and that you need to buy STEEM in order to acquire them.
One thing that many say is that steem has the community and you can't copy a community, this is true however one reason why this community is so powerful is that we all use the same token and all want it to suceed, implementing a token for each sub communities could turn out to be very divisive if this tokens doesn't directly benefit steem power holders.
A pegged smartcoin to BTC or USD could work pretty well, and even then, it would be powered by STEEM
Do you envision a BTC SmartCoin on STEEM having some kind of a reward pool functionality as well, it just trading only?
People still have to have SP to be able to submit transactions at all. If the network activity gets very high, the amount of SP you'd need would increase - in principle, this should drive demand for STEEM.
In my mockup of a token I've also included some other mechanisms where the token would require STEEM.
What mockup are you refering to? Can you tell more about these mechanisms?
My mockup is private so far, but I may launch it this summer if I have time. I envision requiring people to burn Steem to be able to perform certain actions on the subchain.
Love the idea of communities and tokens as I have some ideas in this direction for quite sometime myself.
Sounds great, I don't know much about it but if the demand of steem increases, It will be good for community.
Really neat ideas. @inertia would this make us competitors to Bitshares or would BTS still be useful?
I don't see this supplanting BitShares. If you have a product and you don't want a turn-key community (perhaps because you're doing your own), use BitShares. And I just don't see Community Tokens implementing Smart Coins. But I could be wrong.
Interesting. Looking forward to seeing how this all plays out who knows it may be a good thing for BTS as well.
It's about time they listen to you :P
Maybe, but I think it's just the next logical step, and they figured it out.
Hello @inertia !! how are you going ? I am sorry to bring this my problem of connection to discord here on your post ! But Fyrstikken is proving impossible for me to reach here ! So i am unabale to find an initstion into discord steemspeak that works ! Each time i ask somebody i know to be there to send me one, its out of date or invalid invitation, the message given !1 Any ideas how i might rejoin ?? thanks ) i have set up a serveur of my own called steemspeak so that maybe we can chat there on my problem of access ? https://discord.gg/NmMJmnN
These features will surely have to be built into the consensus layer and thus require a hard fork. So maybe communities are a bit further out than thought?
Or is it somehow done without need to change consensus?
Communities will be implemented way before the tokens are added.
Thanks for clearing that up. Was worried about scope creep (and can't watch video at work).
UIA will really be the next chapter of Steem. It's only the natural thing to head to with the immense potential of the Steem Blockchain. Altho this according to @ned will still be along the pipeline as there are more pressing issues to attend to.
Every exciting stuff, I have all sort of ideas running through my head. Did anybody mention a time frame for implementation?
I don't think there's any timeframe. We still need Communities (without tokens).
Alright, thanks. I have plenty of time to prepare xD
This is an idea I've had for a while. I even have a partial mockup built in Python. In a couple weeks I could potentially collaborate on this.
This looks really interesting... looking forward for it...