We are living in exciting times.
The world of cryptocurrency is about to get a huge lift. This is coming in the form of Smart Media Tokens. Ultimately, we are going to see the exposure this entire industry gets change in a short period of time when they go live.
Yesterday, it was reported that the amount of Americans who have cryptocurrency doubled in 2019. The percentage rose to 14.4% from 7.95%. This means that 36.5M people in the United States now own cryptocurrency.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/number-of-americans-owning-crypto-doubled-in-2019-finder
This is an encouraging sign. According to the study that was done, most of the people were doing it for investment purposes. What this tells me is these were individuals who bought in. Certainly, this is one way to see growth from this sector.
However, this process overlooks the greatest percentage of people in the world. The truth is most do not have excess money to invest. This is where the concept of being rewarded enters the picture.
The Smart Media Token protocol is going to change everything. This piece of software is going to enable any website to have its own token. It matters none whether it is Sally Smith Homesteading or Reddit. All sites can be tokenized to provide rewards to their users.
As I consider this concept, I can see how much exposure cryptocurrency is going to receive. Traffic on the Internet numbers in the billions. Last I looked there were somewhere around 4B people online. That is a huge pool to tap into.
So far, the entire premise of cryptocurrency was to bring people into this industry. With SMTs, cryptocurrency is going to be brought to them. This will shift it from one based upon individuals to one where businesses are the primary driver of things.
This is what Steem 2.0 is. We will be making the shift from a bunch of individuals running everything to some larger players entering the picture. Businesses will have the opportunity to incorporate what is developed on Steem into their models.
Therefore, most tokens created using this protocol will expose thousands to the concept of cryptocurrency. If a few large players implement a token, this number could grow into tens of millions very quickly.
It is a revolutionary idea because familiarity increases usage. People tend to shy away from that which they do not understand. If, however, people are earning tokens simply for engaging on their favorite sites, this will only foster greater acceptance. It will also increase the numbers significantly.
There are thousands of sites out there that get over 1M monthly visitors. Take MySpace as an example. This is a platform most think is dead. Yet it still have about 8M monthly visitors. The tokenization of that site would instantly add a lot more users to cryptocurrency.
https://www.statista.com/chart/17392/myspace-global-traffic/
The market is out there. Billions are awaiting this simple concept. People are not going to turn away from being rewarded for doing what they already are. Hopefully, the infrastructure will grow at a rapid pace to offer these people what they need.
In the meantime, the development of the protocol is crucial. The coding is done and, yesterday, @steemitblog posted an update. It seems that @inertia created the first SMT ever (historic moment?).
The update also spells out the features of SMTs in non-technical terms. It is a worthy read.
https://steempeak.com/smts/@steemitblog/understanding-smt-features
SMTs are going to cause a massive expansion of cryptocurrencies. The idea will easily go viral. If creating a token is as easy as putting together a website, things will move rather quickly.
The key is that SMTs will be brought to the masses. When a site implements a token, all those users are, obviously, candidates to start receiving tokens. However, that is not all they are. Each one of them is a candidate to create their own token. As people come up with different uses for cryptocurrency as it pertains to their website, more will be implementation will take place.
Thus, we see the exponential growth factor in play. The tentacles of the SMT protocol could just keep extending. Hundreds of millions of people have websites catering to all kinds of different areas of interest. All of them have a certain amount of followers which only extends the reach.
Overall, after the first few decent sized hits, the concept of token creation should filter through the Internet. If the process on Steem is very simple, it will expand rapidly. People want uncomplicated. Ease of use is of the utmost importance.
If the SMTs provide that, it will expose hundreds of millions of people across the Internet to tokens. Ultimately, we know a certain percentage of those people are going to embrace it and start using it.
That is how Steem along with the entire industry, could see massive growth in a short period of time.
When businesses find it viable, they will put it in front of their customers. Initially, it will be to get a leg up on everyone else. In the end, though, sites will do it simply to maintain pace with everyone else.
In a few years, seeing a website without a token tied to it will be like looking at a flip phone. It will bring back memories of a time gone by.
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