Suppose you attached an SMT to your blog, and you started paying commentators with your tokens. By what processes might the receivers of these tokens be able to use them to acquire goods and services? In case the first few SMT projects get into trouble in connection with managing these processes, the leaders of the SMT project should plan to make a deep investment in helping those first few projects to be successes and not failures with regard to the said processes.
Not far from the issues underlying the foregoing remarks, issues brought up very nicely in your post, is the need to get down to basics on what we mean by “value”. Let us say that by the “exchange value” of an asset (at a given moment of time and in a particular market), I mean the number of units of exchange that are given up by a person to acquire the asset from another person.
In the flood of articles yesterday and this morning concerning the SMT announcement, I perceive that most of the references to value are references to exchange value.
If this perception is correct, then perhaps it would be good to think about the following question. If you need to keep paying more and more contributors to your blog for their contributions with your SMTs, must you not continually expand its supply? The more your SMT recipients try to sell their received tokens the greater will be the downward pressure on the price coming from your inflation of the supply.
That pressure will be counteracted only if there is an overwhelming (relative to the amount of pressure) expansion in the volume of demand among those who want to buy the token. What forces are going to create such a sufficiently great demand force regarding your particular SMT?
Moreover, for the price curve to remain on an upward incline in the face of the continual inflation, this overwhelming volume of demand has to remain in force more or less indefinitely.
Could it be that a well-grounded hope for improved valuation of a new SMT coin will have to use a broader concept of value than exchange value? What do I mean by a broader concept? Here are a couple of examples of what I mean. The Steem coin has a utility value that promises, as far as I can see, to have a long and bright future. Second, when the King starts to crack down on the cryptocurrencies that are deemed to unduly threaten the Kingdom’s tax revenues and proper collective management of the Kingdom’s money supply, Steem, in my opinion, will be one of the cryptocurrencies not targeted for destruction by the King.
That’s why I expect to sleep soundly every night over my investment in Steam Power; a fact that brings up a third kind of value that is not exchange value.