Tokenized miners -- they operate on code and contribute to building the Steem ecosystem into the thriving platform that we all know and forsee. Will they create something greater than the ICO revolution?
First, A Little History of Tokenized Miners on the Steem Blockchain:
A few weeks back, 
EM and EMFOUR (Engine Miner and Engine Miner Four). Each of these miners have 1 function — mine ENG tokens. The EMFOUR mines 4x faster than the EM, but was listed at a 25% discount comparative to EM.
The EMFOUR miners sold out in just a few days and sold for hundreds of thousands of STEEM. It was a spectacular thing to watch and I made sure to buy a few for myself as well.
Shortly thereafter came the PALMM and the PALM — a similar structure and setup for tokenized miners for the PAL token that we’ve all come to know and love.
Now, a new miner has launched: the SCTM. SCTM is a miner for the SCT token which is for the Korean condenser interface: https://www.steemcoinpan.com/. Many have compared SCT as being the Korean-specific Palnet.io
The Value of Tokenized Miners
There are a lot of aspects to tokenized miners that make them worthwhile for both businesses/communities on the blockchain as well as users/investors.
- No real-world energy costs/No degradation
- Better liquidity
- Ease of use
- Fractional ownership
- Instant funds to kickstart a business/community
1). No real-world energy costs/No degradation
These digital miners don’t carry any real-world energy costs. The only thing you need to do is spend a little STEEM and stake them in your wallet and bada bing bada boom, you’re earning a passive token income.
There is no detriment to the planet and there is no need to upgrade your hardware every year. You just stake the token for as long as you want to mine the underlying asset.
2). Better liquidity
The liquidity on these digital miners is very important. In just a few weeks (dependent on the unstake time set by the issuer), you can unstake the tokens and resell them back to the market.
In many cases, you may even be able to sell them above market price due to limited supply and high demand to mine the underlying.
As the alternative being physical miners — try buying some ASIC miners and then resell them and tell me how that goes ;)
3). Ease of use
These digital miners that Steem Engine has so beautifully thought up are so easy to use. If you already have a Steem account, then it is just a few steps to get yourself onto Steem-Engine, buy a miner, stake it and then collect your “paycheck” every so often.
Again, compare this to physical miners or even master nodes. These are much more accessible and allow anyone - even the non-technical - to take advantage of mining digital assets.
4). Fractional ownership
You could buy 1 STEEM worth of a miner if you wanted to. I think that’s an amazing thing. I’m not sure how much you’d make doing that, but it’s the principal that counts.
You don’t need $10,000 to drop on mining equipment. You can just take a small amount of money, buy a mining token, stake it and take fractional ownership of a passive income stream.
5). Instant funds to kickstart a business/community
On the business side of the spectrum, these digital miners allow any business or community to launch and have some working capital instantly.
So long as they can drive demand for their digital miners, they’ll get access to some liquid STEEM instantly that they can use to empower their business/community.
This will help greatly in redistributing STEEM to the places where it is needed most — the ones building on the blockchain and carving their own niche out in the Steem ecosystem.
In my opinion, digital token miners are a revolution. Not just on Steem but for crypto as a whole. This is a means to investing a small portion of your money in a variety of miners that will yield a passive token that you can then sell or stake to continue to build and be a part of your favorite communities.
This is also yet another reason to attract businesses to the Steem blockchain. Where else do you see a business launch a digital token and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars instantly?
We can all agree that the more businesses that join Steem, the better. Businesses/communities are and will be the lifeblood of Steem and will allow us to onboard new users and redistribute wealth to the right places.