RE: Smart Media Tokens to allow point-and-click ICOs (and MUCH MORE)
Well the point and click ICO is a good idea - it's a logical extension of the point-and-click token creation that the Waves Platform has had for some time now (but they don't have contracts yet so creating an ICO was not possible).
However could someone describe to me why, if I was adding and SMT to my blog or website, why would someone want to buy those tokens? Unless my website allows them to utilize them to promote content above mine there is no reason for anyone to buy my tokens. Contributors, commenters all get tokens for free.
If I open my site up to multiple contributors - not just a personal blog - maybe I expect contributors to want to buy the tokens to hold so they can upvote themselves for a considerable bump, or promote their own posts in the hopes of more upvote love from the community?
Or will the be some mechanism to tie my private SMT token to a regular ad-network and drive ad-inventory to my site?
Perhaps I just place ads or affiliate links on my site as normal and commit to spend a certain percentage of that revenue buying back my own tokens to drive up the price? That could work but seems very manual and prone to error or fraud. Sure only sites that really do it would increase their token price and hopefully attract more traffic to them because of it. But remember that author, comment and voter rewards are driven by inflation. A site needs to continuously spend money just to maintain the value of the token.
If I'm just a sole operator - there really seems little reason to do this unless you're going to be expecting a lot of traffic.
Sorry, not being pessimistic - it's definitely a new paradigm that none of us have experience with. Just being skeptical and trying to figure out how and if it will work.
These are valuable questions. I am probably in a similar situation, I have some websites that I could throw open for people to create content but I don't have a staff of programmers to implement it. I am not pessimistic regarding the value aspects though. I think this could work. Once the features are fully developed I don't think it will be necessary for everyone to create their own isolated tokens or even have the ico (if they don't need money to startup). There will probably be a way to tap into the wider network of decentralized content/participation tokens, with various convertibilities to other tokens and ultimately maybe to steem. Or like let's say I had some steem, as a creator of a new token I could have an exchange where I prop up the value of the token by offering an ongoing low bid to maintain sone minimum value to the token. To start with I think folks would accept new type tokens and some convertibility would emerge. Or a website owner could sign up as an affiliate of someone else's token network, with ability to change token networks that their site pays out in later. Like you I am very interested in this and in particular would like to see it lead to a way to open up our own websites for tokenized community creativity!
Although I should say, from my standpoint I would be happy if there were a way to simply bring my websites into a Steemit network and make them Steem powered. The ability to create my own tokens could be cool and valuable. But ultimately I just want to be able to open my websites up for Steemit type community content creation and interaction. To do it with Steem or whatever other token the Steemit team would provide would be fine by me. I have multiple websites and don't need a token for each and ever one. Maybe if they had primarily 75% steem and 25% payout in a native alt coin that could be cool. I think something like this is where it could go.