Hello! Re. “The big challenge for me so far is - how to explain the technical side of SMTs to people who might not even be familiar with blockchain … but I think there is a way.” I feel you have put your fingers on one of the tall hurdles in the path of cryptos going mainstream.
Also, it does not help that computer science professors and their students seem to have believed they should feel free to distort the usual usage of several common English words, and then expect ordinary people to simply accept that and learn to talk their way.
These are the same ordinary people that are their future clients to whom it is sometimes crucial to explain things clearly. There is not enough money inside computer science for them to get away with such sloppy communication practices, in my opinion. The leaders of the SMT project should make a big effort to get a breakthrough on clear communications to non-technical people.
One helpful step would be to show the pseudo-code of a protocol and not the code in a specific language’s syntax. A great deal of what we call “development” is designing the rules and steps of a protocol, which rarely requires that we start by writing computer code.
Moreover, there is nothing in computer science that makes people geniuses at this particular step of protocol design (they are geniuses in expressing the rules and steps in the code of a specific language), so all you have to do is represent the design using plain language before you get into the computer code. Then you use that plain-language version to talk to clients.