@techwriter, @donkeypong -- Thanks for your feedback!

@donkeypong -- I agree with you on some ICOs having poor value propositions, that's for sure... And I agree DAILY would have some value. However, we should critically examine what these value drivers are.

Currencies derives their value as technology which facilitates trade. Belief is required to make this work, but it is not itself what creates value. Belief may also influence price, but price is not value. Most believe that price must eventually converge to value (and not the other way around).

Examining Steem's existing tokens as a proxy for SMT, these tokens derive their value primarily from 2 internal (i.e., within the native platform) and 1 external use:

• internal: increase influence, obtain more curation rewards;
• external: use for payments.

My point about value as cryptocurrency dropping to zero is that, especially as we have new and better crypto coming out, unless Steem and other SMTs build in features that make them a better payment mechanism (at least in certain circumstances) than fiat and other crypto out there, no one is going to want to buy Steem/SMT/DAILY to make payments to people outside the native platform. E.g., you're not going to buy stuff from Amazon with SMT. You'll convent to a fiat or perhaps another crypto.

As for internal uses, influence does have value, but influence over local news will have less value overall than same level influence on global news. Hence, I think DAILY can achieve some of the milestones in your story, but not all. My guess is that the value would cap somewhere around what you describe in months 3-4.

Earning more curation rewards is only valuable to the extent that the token has other valuable uses.

You could try to create additional value for SMTs like DAILY by restricting aspects of platform usage to token-holders, like subscription services or buying add space. But if the same platform features could, from a technology perspective, just as well be accessed with fiat or some other crypto, than forcing subscribers/advertisers to convert to DAILY to access these features results in deadweight loss in the economy overall, although it may serve to increase the value of the token. I call this phenomenon value diversion, and it is ubiquitous across token-based projects. In some cases they are is a great enough economic benefit to offset the cost of value diversion, but in others there is not. We should all be very careful when examining the merits of tokens whose value derives from value diversion...

Giving discounts on subscriptions/ad-space purchases to people who pay in DAILY is essentially just a loyalty rewards program. These types of programs have been valuable to many corporates. However, we should also examine in each case whether the SMT is the best available way to track loyalty (on a cost-benefit basis). If not, we should consider other methods of achieving the same result (e.g., just giving discounts to repeat customers).

tl;dr—I think SMT are a really cool idea that can have big benefits for some platforms, although my suspicion is that the most benefits will be reaped by the largest platforms, where influence is the most valuable.

P.S.: If you are interested, I've recently written a paper exploring the topics we've discussed in this thread. In case you are interested, you can read about it in this post, or read the full paper here. The paper contains a case study on Steemit which might be of particular interest. Very grateful for your feedback if you get a chance to read! Trying to crowdsource some peer review :)