Hi folks, I've spoken with a few people privately about this, so I thought I'd make a quick public announcement. If you've been reading the steem front page at all lately, you've seen posts about something called "SMTs." SMT stands for "Smart Media Token," and it's the next big hot thing that the Steem devs are talking about adding to our platform.
The idea of an SMT is that anybody will be able to go create their own token and configure it so that people can earn it by voting on posts, just like Steem. Say you're from the great state of Colorado, and you want to get a Colorado-themed community started. But you don't have any Steem Power, and you don't have any money to buy some to distribute rewards. No problem! Just create a COLO token, configure its reward pool, and bam you've got your own little sub-steem community token. Very cool, eh?
I had someone tell me today that "SMT kind of crushes POCKET." Well, that's a bit harsh -- maybe we think through it first. Let's talk through some possible scenarios:
The community supports migrating POCKET to the SMT platform. This means that we pick a time, and say "everybody who owns POCKET tokens on this date at this time gets a balance of a new SMT token called 'POCKET'." What would happen? Well, someone would have to do the work to create the new token and then issue the new POCKETs to everybody. What would change? Well, we'd lose the ability to send POCKET tokens to people via comments, which seems to me one of POCKET's biggest use-cases right now. On the other hand, you'd be able to trade POCKET directly with STEEM on the new decentralized exchange.
We leave POCKET as-is, and create a decentralized IOU gateway that helps us list POCKET tokens on the SMT decentralized exchange. I like this option, as it would give me a chance to design a nifty, secure, safe, decentralized gateway system and I've been thinking about doing that anyway. This way, we'd still have POCKET tokens available to tip via comments, but we'd also be able to trade it against various other SMTs.
The community is split on this, and some people do it one way and some people do it the other way. POCKET is decentralized, so there's nothing stopping the community from splitting and doing a BTC-BCC-type fork. If someone migrates POCKET directly to SMT, other people could continue running the old POCKET confirmer bots. Then we'd have a POCKET-classic and a POCKET-SMT, and the two wouldn't really interact with each other at all.
I like option 2, but please understand that I'm thinking way way ahead since we probably won't actually have SMTs for many more months.
