I've been reading some more of that Aeon stuff after you showed me the blog the other day... really great blog! I think you are right, they would be a great case study for how to utilize SMTs.
The big challenge for me so far is - how to explain the technical side of SMTs to people who might not even be familiar with blockchain beyond a vague awareness of bitcoin. It's a lot of info to chew on... but I think there is a way.
I had a recent conversation with a successful local entrepreneur in Raleigh's music industry and.. he was more open to it than I expected. The idea of generating revenue from content, without supporting random advertisements from Coca Cola / etc, seems to be a powerful incentive for business owners to learn more.
Good point! It's a good time to explore the possibilities of SMTs and I think there'll be good use cases coming out of unexpected places.
Hello! Re. “The big challenge for me so far is - how to explain the technical side of SMTs to people who might not even be familiar with blockchain … but I think there is a way.” I feel you have put your fingers on one of the tall hurdles in the path of cryptos going mainstream.
Also, it does not help that computer science professors and their students seem to have believed they should feel free to distort the usual usage of several common English words, and then expect ordinary people to simply accept that and learn to talk their way.
These are the same ordinary people that are their future clients to whom it is sometimes crucial to explain things clearly. There is not enough money inside computer science for them to get away with such sloppy communication practices, in my opinion. The leaders of the SMT project should make a big effort to get a breakthrough on clear communications to non-technical people.
One helpful step would be to show the pseudo-code of a protocol and not the code in a specific language’s syntax. A great deal of what we call “development” is designing the rules and steps of a protocol, which rarely requires that we start by writing computer code.
Moreover, there is nothing in computer science that makes people geniuses at this particular step of protocol design (they are geniuses in expressing the rules and steps in the code of a specific language), so all you have to do is represent the design using plain language before you get into the computer code. Then you use that plain-language version to talk to clients.
At the same time - does "mainstream adoption" require most people to understand the technical details?
The only people who need to deeply understand this are the CTOs, the technical leaders of the corporations that will leverage SMT technology. For those people, the white paper for SMTs should be easy to understand.
Hell, even for me - it only took about two hours to go through the paper and understand all the key points. How much easier does it need to be? Consider that this is technology which creates a new currency. I think there's some complexity inherent in that.