Being a replacement is not as good as innovating.
bitcoin was supposed to be the Fiat killer, promoted throughout years for the ultimate anarchist currency, and the hope of our society to get rid of greed imprinted on money. Unreasonable expectations really none of them are solid reasons for speculation or investment, the majority of people will not cop with those ideals and they will not going to flow into crypto to kill fiat or whatever.
People are not interested into politics, I guess you all have that figured out by now, don't you? People will only get interested into crypto for 2 reasons. One is that it will makes them rich and the other is that it will make their lives easier and give them a solution to use money with safety online. They don't care about greed corruption and manipulation that is imprinted at fiat from central control and manipulation. They are oblivious of the term "negative interest rates" on their savings account, They actually don't give a flying fuck about that. They luck of economic educations and that term is not going to make them hate at the banks more than they do now or they did in the past, not until all their moneys are vapor.
For any crypto to become a mass adopted technology must be a tech they don't care or be actively aware, it must give them solutions for problems they didn't knew that existed. It must be something that is trending but there is not a probability for financial risks on their part and even if there was that should not stop them because "hey John is using it, so it must be ok?". For a crypto to succeed and become the center of global attention should be presented as a risk free global trend that generates wealth. And that is my fifty cents on the matter. Steem does check all this things out. It does have the potential to be used as the underlay layer that will empower the monetary wealth distribution at every social outlet out there.
For this to be a thing we would need to be able to link our social outlets with our Steem id's that way we should be able to use our Steem power to vote for everything wherever is posted and give value to everyone that has a Steem id linked with the rest of his social media outlets. That if possible and I think it should be can change the way peoples perception of social media. For that to be achieved we will need the tools to make it happen and I am not a specialist or a developer on stuff of the likes.
This is not science fiction I believe that it can happen but needs a ton of know how and time to develop something of the likes. You will probably need to come with some kind of agreement with third parties about it. The rest of the social media outlets should not see Steemit as a competitor for the year that comes rather as a powerful tool to widen their global influence at the attention economy of social media. Either way steemit will be in the center of that game at the foreseeable future. We just have to take advantage of our position at this moment and keep the network effect that will snowball us at the top social media outlets of the world. We deserve to be on the top 10 media of the world.
Not just the top 10 cryptocurrencies of the world. That is not a high goal enough for steemit, even though most of us would be ok with just that it allows competition to take the leap out of our hands we should not allow that. We must keep our lead and evolve to something bigger.
Closing this
We don't have to replace money so we have no competition at crypto. We are just a real world need for underlying reform of how social media works and the solution for most of the social media problems. The luck of giving a solid financial motivation to both their customers and their employees. And that is how we will change everything thought was possible before us.
Attention economies will rule the world, we have a great advantage but we are a bit to busy making money to notice right now. Put some percentage of the reward pool towards active promotion and advertisement as well as development and hackathons. Let them know we are here to stay and we are being paid to be sovereign citizens. Get rid of the beta logo and open the doors for the masses to come and put us on the test.