Running a publishing business on Steem using SMTs, some clarifications needed.
Hello Steemians.
I'm new to Steem/Steemit - this is my second post - and I would very much like to know more about the publishing and business side of the Steem blockchains platform, and SMTs in particular. I've studied the Steem papers and the SMT white paper and done as much research as I think I can, considering I'm not a programmer, though I'm not completely lost regarding IT in general.
First, I think Steem is great. I definitely think you're on to something here. And as being someone involved in the publishing business for quite some time, I especially find SMTs intriguing. After studying the SMT white paper, some business ideas have started to grow in the back of my mind. Some things, though, I find a bit unclear. Things that, in the end of the day, will affect the business side of a venture building on SMT on Steem.
I reckon from the struct smt_setup_operation in the SMT white paper that I can assign a name for my tokens. So let's for the sake of the discussion call them MYTOKEN. So, in the eyes of the general public, there will be a "cryptocurrency" called MYTOKEN that in their eyes is something else than STEEM. People engaging in a media outlet running on MYTOKEN, let's call it myinterface.com, will earn MYTOKENs, right, not STEEM.
Once MYTOKENs are created, will there be a default marketplace where MYTOKENs are traded, without having to list the token with an exchange, and is it possible to sign up with an exchange, any exchange, if I wish to do so?
Is there anything stopping me, from a technical cryptocurrency viewpoint, from trying to develop some nifty way of trading MYTOKENs directly to Euro, and not using the (from a general public user experience viewpoint) horrible sequence of trading MYTOKEN -> STEEM -> BTC -> EUR?
Will holders of STEEM/SP/SBD, without converting STEEM to MYTOKEN, be able to influence the content, or anything else for that matter, on myinterface.com? In other words: Do they affect my publishing business? If so, in what way? If not, then i guess there must be some kind of equivalent of SP in relationship to MYTOKEN, e.g. vested MYTOKEN or MYTOKEN_POWER if you like?
Will the witnesses for a SMT automatically be the Steem witnesses, or can the SMT employ their own witnesses and nodes? As I understand it, witnesses assesses the content on Steemit, and can, at least technically, censor content. If Steem wishes to attract serious publishers, then this is simply out of the question. They will never let anyone else assess their content with the potential of censoring it.
Now, regarding the Steem blockchain itself, I guess an SMT-style ICO doesn't involve any kind of forking off the Steem blockchain, neither hard nor soft? So from the interface/business perspective, myinterface.com will run on Steem as the blockchain (or database) backend. Will it be like an ERC-20-token on the Steem blockchain, i.e. a dApp? Can someone please elaborate on the pros and cons of an SMT over a hard fork (if I'm not mistaken about the forking assumption)?
Laszlo