[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmTA4fXAbuHieBy2JJhJiyKbA8cdi1YT9QmJk5ogjWgwkF/SMT%20Release.jpg]
UPDATE, March 11th, 2019: We have delayed the release of SMTs to focus on MIRA, which is software that leverages state-of-the-art database technology developed by Facebook to move the blockchain from RAM to commodity hardware. We expect the release of SMTs to dramatically increase the amount of transactions made to our blockchain (already one of the most used) and as the team behind the largest blockchain application in the world, we understand that the most urgent scaling consideration is not transaction throughput, but the cost of operating high-traffic nodes. That's why it's critical that we complete work on MIRA before releasing SMTs. That being said, much of the work on SMTs is already complete. Be sure to follow @steemitblog if you would like to remain updated on our progress.
Hello Steemians! We have some exciting news to share.
We are about to put the finishing touches on Hardfork 20, thanks to our core development team and your thoughtful suggestions and review. As a result, we can now focus on delivering Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) to you.
SMTs Release Date
We’re happy to announce and commit to a release of the TestNet in ~~January 2019 along with a release and launch of the protocol on the MainNet in March 2019~~:
~~January 15, 2019 - SMT development complete and live on the TestNet.~~
~~March 24, 2019 - SMT fully released and live on the Steem Blockchain.~~ ~~
See update above.
What are SMTs?
Smart Media Tokens are a token-launching protocol similar to ERC20s on Ethereum, but with all the state-of-the-properties enabled by the Steem blockchain, like three-second fee-less transfers. SMTs enable anyone to launch their own STEEM-like token with customizable features including Founders Tokens, Token Emission Rates, Proof-of-Brain, ICO Smart Contracts, and more.
A Post-SMT World
After the launch of SMTs, anyone in the world will be able to create their own cryptocurrency with industry-leading capabilities, and immediate access to the largest cryptocurrency community in the world. To learn more about Smart Media Tokens, check out the SMT whitepaper at https://smt.steem.io.
Steem Blockchain Team
Over the past six months, we have been making significant changes to our company, in regards to hiring more amazing talent, updating our culture around making and achieving dates on our deliverables, and improving our process so that we can produce more high-quality code, at a faster rate, with greater predictability in our schedule. Being able to communicate to the community what we are planning to do and when it will be delivered has been one of our number one goals in 2018.
We’ve already delivered several products like Hivemind 1.0 and AppBase which contains the underpinnings required to ship three different products: Communities, Velocity, and SMTs. AppBase does this not only by modularizing the plugin infrastructure, but also establishing much needed primitive types like NAIs.
After seeing the level of excitement that has gathered around Smart Media Tokens, the team wanted to be absolutely certain that when we announced dates, they were ones we could confidently meet. That is why we have not provided a date until today. With all of the changes we have made internally, we now feel confident the deadlines we are giving today are ones we will meet.
There are several blockchains that support prediction markets. If you really feel that strongly in our inability to meet the deadlines we have set, you are welcome to open up a bet ;)
As always, all feedback is much appreciated.
First of all, to clarify - running a witness node, and running a "full" RPC node are two different things. Often the witnesses are the ones who run full RPC nodes, but technically speaking they are not the same. (Not all witnesses run full nodes, and not all full nodes are run by the witnesses.)
In terms of the system requirements for running nodes (both witness and full RPC) the development team provided a lot of information about this back in this post.
If SMTs lead to more adoption and more transactions on the blockchain, then that will ultimately lead to higher requirements for running nodes. The hope is that greater adoption will lead to increase in price, but it is not a guarantee. That is always going to be a risk for the economics of running a node.
The cost of running a witness node is still relatively low, and even with some extreme growth - it should still remain reasonable for top witnesses to afford running a witness node for the foreseeable future, assuming we don't see an extremely drastic reduction in price.
As far as full RCP nodes, those could start to get a lot more expensive if the memory requirements exceed 512 GB of RAM, but from what I've heard the development team is planning on expanding the RocksDB implementation (that was recently adopted for account history) to support the other operations as well - which should significantly help with the memory requirements for those nodes.
This is extremely off topic for this thread, but I will reply non-the-less.
I am not planning to use a price feed bias as this time. I am not playing dumb. I am aware of the economics behind SBD and have written quite a few posts about the topic. I also submitted two pull requests to update the SBD economics as part of hardfork 20.
There is little need right now to "burn the debt". The market has demonstrated over the past several months that there has actually been a demand for more SBD. A short-term change in the cryptocurrency markets is not enough to warrant any drastic policy changes.
Even if the debt limit exceeds 10%, that is not the end of the world. The price of SBD has been sustained for a prolonged period without traders even using the conversion function. If conversions are not supported at 1 SBD to $1 worth of STEEM for some time - that does not necessarily mean the market will not be able support the peg based on demand alone.
I'm not really sure what you are referring to as a bail-out. I have heard no such thing being discussed, and it doesn't sound like something I would support.
In terms of the absolute worst case scenario of what could happen, the debt ratio could significantly go past the 10% mark, and the market may see that as too substantial of a risk, and no longer support the peg. At that point the SBD peg would become broken (well, more broken than it already has been, given that it has not really been at a stable $1 USD price for quite some time). The risk here is 100% on SBD holders, and poses little risk for holders of STEEM. This is really more of a "hypothetical what-if" though, and not something I believe has a high probability of happening.
Tim, thank you for your reply,
The bear market has significant downward pressure on steem and also sbd.
Because of this, the market value has dropped also significantly.
This is a new situation because, with 15+ million sbd debt and the market cap in a downward spiral, they will meet each other at 10%. Because we stopped printing sbd's at 5% there is more steem created. Which re-enforce the downward pressure on steem. What we see is that even when steem price is rising, the market cap is still coming down. Price Feed Bias is created as control mechanism to keep stability.
Your proposal to extend the debt ratio from 2-5% to 9-10% is like opening the door for a "Black Swan" event to happen. Before the HF20 we could already be above 10%. Will you put HF20 on hold?
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
At 10%+ we break the SBD floor, this means sbd will free float and could go to zero. And your mention that only the sbd bagholders will feel the pain? Is just not true, in a scenario like this, steem would go to zero first, followed by the sbd bagholders. Remember, SBD is not being printed, but steem is, more and more. It's like holding a little bird in your fist, and sqeeze all the life out of it.
Then there is only one more thing to do, and that's close the door on our way out.
I have no immediate plans to add interest for SBD. I don’t think it is necessary under current conditions.
Generating demand for STEEM and generating demand for SBD are largely unrelated.
As far as increasing demand for STEEM, my most recent post is touching on the subject. The short answer though is that it is everyone’s responsibility.
An interesting question to think about, because many stakeholders think this way - if someone’s content is not generating more demand for STEEM, should it even be getting paid?
A full node costs $700-$1,000/month, and soon to be much much more. It's not cheap, yet a witness node costs $60 and pays anywhere from $0 to $100K+/year. Not saying top 20 shouldn't run one, but it shows the flaw in the system.
A full node has nothing to do with witnessing, and this is coming from some who manages 4 full nodes. Full nodes are a dev project, and a project the size of DTube shouldn't be using public nodes and should have their own, just like any large projects, especially with 2M free delegation.
Public nodes serve one purpose, they allow small projects to bootstrap and avoid the crippling expense of a full node allowing them to bootstrap. Once you get large enough, you should be using your own private full nodes to sustain your project not leaching off the very few public full nodes that are available and overwhelmed.
Well I can't speak to what has been going on internally at steemit Inc, or the difficulties they may have had in development of SMTs or Community functionality while maintaining network security. Nor can I speak to their effectiveness of hiring or getting new programmers up to speed/the slowdowns wrought by loss of programmers.
Should they have released something over the past year? Yeah, however I don't know how interwoven the various things they are concocting are, and how much code replacement they would have to do as they roll things out. IE releasing things piecemeal could have been a waste of time.
You, likely do have more insight on this then I do. I can only attest to the slowness of good development based on my life's experiences working for a small pharmaceutical.
Your criticism is certainly valid, I'm not trying to say it isn't. More sometimes, shit happens and things just take a long time. If the product actually ends up being good, then patience pays off.
> Why do you have an avatar? Is there a point to it?
When you've stupidly chosen the name 'justtryme90' it's necessary to put a happy face somewhere to present at least some appearence of not being an asshole. The username certainly indicates I would be.
In the end though, I have one because it's fun. It's not necessary really, but it makes me happy. I don't know that if I had nothing, my output would be any less professional. But certainly the appearence wouldn't be as nice.
I have a ton of respect for you, but on this I disagree and don't get your argument. On the one hand you're saying that Steem has no value as a protocol (strongly disagree) and that SMTs are what will give it value. Then you claim Steem 2.0 as a threat, despite the fact that Steem 2.0 is not SMTs 2.0. I do not believe it is rational to think that somehow while Dan is trying to make EOS work he can build a better Steem while at the same time the team that actually built Steem is working their butts off making it better and better. That being said, it's odd to argue first that Steem has no value and then that Steem 2.0, derivative in its very name, is a threat. Now let's assume that there is also an SMT competitor in the works. First, where's the specs? Second, where's the timeline? Third, do people believe that Dan is incapable of generating actually original ideas as opposed to just copying what we do? I actually have more respect for Dan than that, and hope he's working on something that will bring additional value to the sector. All the work we've already done on Steem and SMTs is valuable. Nothing we've done has been "fat" so if someone wants to beat us to the punch, they'll be starting from a serious deficit. This is how long building this takes. There is no other team on the planet that can build this, and certainly no team that could build it faster. Finally, we believe firmly that our approach of building an application-specific protocol will enable us to scale while simultaneously outpacing our competitors. That is our strategy and we're sticking to it. Also, the market doesn't seem to be following your logic today, but you know markets, I'm sure they'll back you up tomorrow ;)
> I have a ton of respect for you, but on this I disagree and don't get your argument. On the one hand you're saying that Steem has no value as a protocol (strongly disagree) and that SMTs are what will give it value. Then you claim Steem 2.0 as a threat, despite the fact that Steem 2.0 is not SMTs 2.0. I do not believe it is rational to think that somehow while Dan is trying to make EOS work he can build a better Steem while at the same time the team that actually built Steem is working their butts off making it better and better. That being said, it's odd to argue first that Steem has no value and then that Steem 2.0, derivative in its very name, is a threat.
I do not argue that Steem has no value. If there are over a million users then clearly it has value. I am arguing that the market does not value Steem as a store of value and that the evidence shows this if we look at the chart history. I argue that something has to be done to reverse this or it's going to allow competitors of Steem to win.
How? Well first their reward pools will be bigger and so the Steem users will simply follow the rewards in most cases. So it is important that the Steem Power and Steem token become a store of value (in terms of BTC price).
That's one theory. Based on your reading of the charts, you have derived a theory on the value of Steem. My theory on why Steem is undervalued is because: 1. Most people are not even aware it is a protocol due to the success of steemit.com. 2. People do not yet understand how they can leverage an application-specific protocol without smart contracts to accomplish everything they need in a blockchain protocol and they require education. 3. All cryptocurrencies effectively move as a unit and the individual variations, whether in price or time, are illusory. 4. Eventually Steem's value proposition, which is already widely recognized, including by you, will be reflected in the price. 5. SMTs help people to see how Steem can add value to their enterprise and provide an opportunity to inject capital into the economy. But that's just my theory, like yours, I have no idea if its right. All of that being said, the witnesses are the ones to convince. Of course, I would support any proposal for which there is consensus among the community.
Yep, that is a slogan. And Steem is "the blockchain of opportunity" if I'm not mistaken.
Frankly, I don't believe in prosperity for all. But I do believe in opportunity for all.
But again, both are merely slogans.
We will see what happens. So, what is now in the making (or at least in the declarations)? Steem 2.0? BitShares 3.0? Using simple logic, when will we see EOS 2.0, with @dan on a different project announcing it?
Reminds me of the government always kicking the can to the next generation to pay the bills.
Didn't they already tell us that SMTs would be here before the end of 2018?
Now another promise of something that is going to depend on more than just the developers of steemit.
Yes tomorrow always comes and every thing else just stays the same. NOT!
There are way to many factors in this fast changing world we live in to keep making promises for future events.
Even Elon Musk cant do that right, Look at the Model 3! And Steemit is no Tesla!
>By the end of April 2018, an estimated 23% of Model 3 U.S. reservations had been refunded, possibly due to the company's announcement of delivery delays
Yeah, you're right. Steemit Inc is actually more responsible than Tesla, lately :p
Obviously, it doesn't matter about the release date except to not expect SMT before then.
I don't mind the updates, anyways.
Surely, ethereum's smart-contracts were a financial boon to the entire ecosystem. There's a good chance of SMT doing something similar for Steem. I'm interested. However, not as interested as I am in having a competitive UX on steemit.com
Ha, young? It's been since 2016. EOS is younger but look at it's price? What about other projects like Tron? Can we not make excuses for the poor market performance of Steem?
Even if you disagree with my opinion on the announcement it is objective fact that Steem under performs in the market chronically.
> I honestly believe that STEEM dropping to 50 cents or below is the best thing that could happen. This is a life changing opportunity for many people. If you don't want to buy more when the market is in crisis mode, that's your issues.
Buy with what? Bitcoin? I don't see others doing that. Show me where people are trading Bitcoin for Steem because if that were happening the Steem to Bitcoin price would be going up not down.
Bitcoin is over 10 years old. Steem you are saying needs 8-12 years? You mean like Myspace? We don't have 8-12 years in a competitive market. I'm with you that Steem is important but I think more emphasis needs to be put on making Steem profitable/sustainable.
Cryptos we all agree on anyway so no one is going to debate that here. But I also think cryptos (including altcoins) should focus or put emphasis on making sure that their platforms or their products not only produce value but actually create demand for the token so that the ecosystem can grow.
Developers are great but only can take a social network so far. I can write code myself but there are more things to do than write code. Most people who write code don't only write code.
> Don't you remember the early days of the internet, or pc's in general or dotcom campanies? They were laughed upon for many years in the beginning. Look where it has come to now. The same exact thing will happen with cryptos in a few years. Steem is not even a toddler yet... 2 year old blockchain with a developer team of 20 people at max.
I was a part of those early days. I was also a part of the early days of peer to peer, of crypto, etc. My point is that just like with Dot Com there was a time when many companies existed with no emphasis on profit for the shareholders. What happened to those companies and which ones survived until now?
No, I always expected a wait. But I do think if you promise shareholders (Q4 2018) and then announce a delay (Q1 2019 testnet) then of course it could spook the market. It's so far though not having much impact one way or the other on the Steem price.
I also never said it's "horrible for me" or said I earn $20 a day; you came up with that. But sure, I would say the more Steem Holders can earn the more people will want to hold. Not just earn from holding Steem but from posting, the reward pool, or any other kind of interaction with the platform. The whole point of holding a token is either you think it's going to go up over time or you want to use it to earn $ or do something productive.
Steem allows people to add value currently but the reward pool isn't growing. As a result the community (not just me) is complaining. They say the reward pool is being exploited, or blame it on bots, but the truth is the reward pool hasn't been growing. Vote selling and bots are a separate issue but connected.
And one of the main problems is retention. People who join Steem post a few times and then leave when they see $1 or so as their reward. It's because the reward pool is shrinking and so the whole situation is unsustainable no matter what you do.
So while there are more accounts than ever (people tend to create accounts when it's a bull market because the rewards are higher) it would indicate to me that if the rewards are higher the rate of growth for Steem would increase.
So we look at it from that perspective and we can see the larger the reward pool the faster the growth of the whole ecosystem for everyone. SMTs can't come soon enough but what to do while we wait for SMTs?
What is the plan after HF20? No ideas to solve the demand problems? Even putting promoted posts on trending could help.
SMTs and communities have unbelievable potential in the mid to longterm. But with only 60k active users u can't expect miracles over night. The tokenization of forums and chats of giant websites could revolutionize the web as we know it.
Next thing that needs to be focused on will be scaling though. To run a full node is unbearably expensive now, because it needs 1 TB of RAM, that's insane.
No. You don't seem to understand how the reward pool works. Actually we recently hit a new alltime high. Never have been more tokens paid out before. Don't get confused with all the SBD that was printed (and worth 5$ each). It is just that the tokens are worth so much less right now that it seems unattractive. When you say reward pool you actually are talking about the worth of the tokens paid out (in Dollars). Yes, we had 5million before, and yes it is now down to 737.000 again. So we lost 85% of that, too. But it will rise again when BTC rises, because STEEM rise with it.
check out steem.supply to see how the reward pool grows and shrinks independently from the worth in Dollars (of it).
> Don't get confused with all the SBD that was printed (and worth 5$ each). It is just that the tokens are worth so much less right now that it seems unattractive. When you say reward pool you actually are talking about the worth of the tokens paid out (in Dollars).
No I'm not talking about the worth of the tokens paid out in dollars. That is exactly why you're missing my point. I'm talking about the worth of the tokens when sold or bought for BTC. This isn't about the dollar value for people who are all in on crypto (long term crypto investors).
And in terms of the worth in BTC the value doesn't grow. Yes you can say the value in USD went up only because Bitcoin went up but that doesn't show me there is demand for Steem independent of Bitcoin which is what I need to see to know the market is fairly valuing Steem.
The USD price is irrelevant because you can't buy Steem on Coinbase right now.
And don't you see a problem if a token can only grow if BTC grows? That means the ecosystem as a whole is not sustainable and literally is merely an extension of the success of BTC.
The problem is Steem has a huge ecosystem (one of the biggest) yet the market cap isn't even top 15. Dogecoin and a bunch of others are higher in market cap in both USD and BTC terms (however you want to look at it).
So how can I ignore the market cap of Steem going down? If what I'm saying isn't a big deal explain a market cap of $263,671,229 USD (only 40,582 BTC !) for the most mainstream platform in the entire crypto ecosystem?
The market cap should be in the billions. Projects which just launched have a market cap in the billions and they don't even have 100k users.
@dj123 | Aug. 20, 2018, 6:15 a.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
have you heard about emotional vest?
something that has this much energy, innovation, leadership stake, holding duration, and many other factors including ego....has real lasting power
don't discount the emotional vest of steem users, even those who are in active have either 1. not powered down 2. powered down but not sold 3. powered down and sold only part and still check steem dapps periodically
and one of the strongest evidence, those who were given loads of free alt-social-media coins who were minnows or at best few dolphins that supposedly moved onto another crypto to become equivalent of large Orcas there....are still here! explain that...
Steem will likely be the continual goto case study and value mimic of BUIDL in the next 5 years, like it is silently now to the 6 competitors i'm following now
It seems that the current certificate is for steem.io and not smt.steem.io.
[IMAGE: https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmbK5rtzzcJKx37Xi3yf3UdVjys7YgnpJyXfYTtUYLy1Ng/image.png]
As I'm not too versed in that area, I'm not sure if it's actually needed to have a certificate for each subdomain.
But what I can say is that my antivirus is not showing that error, even though it checks the websites for me as well.
And antivirus programs are known to often times show false positives.
Regardless, interesting find and it should def. be handled soon.
@dana-edwards, I think we both want the same thing: a healthy Steem price.
And instead of assuming what competition might look like in '19, how about we just take Steem's current strengths.
Which put most other cryptocurrencies into shame. However, the market isn't logical like that - otherwise Bitcoin Gold, a cryptocurrency with nearly zero traction, wouldn't have 1.5x the market cap of Steem.
> Steem has mostly lost value for it's entire chart life. Technical analysts know Steem isn't a good store of value.
Well, I'm not a TA and thus believe in hands-on value, which Steem has enough of.
There is not one blockchain/project out there who could compete with steem (the blockchain) and steemit.com (the frontend) in regards of social media experience and actually active users.
With HF20, I am glad that account creation will be much cheaper then it currently is. I have two projects in mind which I am going to build in the next two years who will use Hivemind, SMTs and with that communities.
EOS can not compete with Steem as people would pay more then 15 USD for an account creation.
Can you point me to any competitor who could replace steem/steemit in the next year?
That's amazing news!
And I guess the time period should be enough to create/finish-up the SMTs we all have been waiting for.
Honestly, I rather wait a bit longer than pushing an unfinished product. That's esepcially important in blockchain technology with bugs which can have unforseen consequences.
With that said:
Now is the time to get back to posting and to accumulate more Steem.
https://media.giphy.com/media/XIqCQx02E1U9W/giphy.gif
4-6 months may sound like a long time, but it isn't. As soon as the testnet is live, the hype will come!
My employer runs a community support site, where our customers can help each other with technical issues.
We reward the most helpful customers by giving them discounts, early beta access to new programs and services, and 'Thumbs-up' points.
They're purely decorative, increasing rank, decorative border around profile pic, that sort of thing.
If I could talk my employer into adopting SMTs, and rewarding helpful customers with crypto instead; along with a mechanism for holders to reward other contributors with 'thumbs-up' rewards, based on the size of their stake, they'd be massively incentivised to check in regularly, help less tech-minded customers with specific problems, and increase the value of the site.
My employer could accept the new tokens for direct payment of customer bills; and we'd end up with customers who get to enjoy our services and pay us with insightful support and advice for other customers.
We only need a couple of success stories, and thousands of communities are going to come pounding on our door for the opportunity to issue their own cryptocurrency, without the inconveniences of running a blockchain.
@midlet | Aug. 15, 2018, 9:15 p.m. | Votes: 2 | [
VOTE ]
Personally it's exciting to me because it expands the potential use cases for Steem. Even though a huge amount of them will likely fail, the Ethereum comparison is valid where just the fact that lots of people will TRY to make something should have a positive impact on the price, and if only a few succeed it should again, just make all this a lot more useful.
I think beyond the price, something that a lot of cryptos are failing on is real world, working, utility. While not perfect, we have that here, and this pushes us even further in the right direction.
@kantos | Aug. 15, 2018, 4:42 p.m. | Votes: 1 | [
VOTE ]
Es genial leer estas noticias, la mejor que pronto es el lanzamiento y que el mundo después de SMT no será el mismo, dentro y fuera de Steemit, todo cambiará, estoy ansioso de que ese día llegue, podremos crear nuestras propias cryptomonedas para proyectos y necesidades personales y empresariales.
"Todo esto es genial"
Gracias al equipo de desarrolladores de @SteemitBlog por darnos siempre, lo mejor.
It's great to read this news, the best that soon is the release and that the world after SMT will not be the same, inside and outside of Steemit, everything will change, I'm anxious for that day to come, we can create our own cryptomonedas for projects and personal and business needs.
"All this is great"
Thanks to the team of developers at @SteemitBlog for always giving us the best.
Again...
THANK YOU!
https://steemitimages.com/0x100/https://i.imgur.com/oIujWBY.png
*With so many comments, my reply will be lost in the noise, but... *
I wanted to say Great work! to all those involved, not just the well known ones and thanks for committing to a reasonable date.
Please share more as it progresses; to me if your facing challenges and it leads to delays, this is ok (perfectly fine in my book) -- also you might not be suprised to hear, there are many Steemians that care about Steemit and Steem and what this represents(We will support you and maybe we can even help - just ask).