Steemit is showing how the future will possibly migrate to a 'different way of valuing something'. Essentially, money or currency as we know it (as a form of value-transfer) will no longer be the only form to 'recognise' value and then 'transfer' that value.
The blogging or written-word community has always had value, but fiat currency has been 'imperfect' as a medium to recognise that value and then transfer it. Steemit is a system that has been designed or tweaked to specifically capture the value from this type of community and then provides a pathway to ultimately transform it to bitcoin or fiat to use within a wider economic sense. BTC, fiat, DASH etc are what I call "Generalised Currency" where Steem is a specific one. An analogy would be the 'shopping car' versus 'the bus'. The shopping car is ideal to go shopping in, it's small, easy to park and very cheap to run but it holds at maximum 4 people. The bus on the other hand is the opposite of the car but it holds 100 people. They are both both modes of transport to move people around to meet their specific objectives i.e. those on a bus are dropped off at close to their approximate destination. Those in the car have a specific destination and can get much closer to their objective. We have lived in a world where only buses were available to transfer-value and 100% controlled by others (Governments & banks). That situation is now changing.
The value from products/projects like steemit come directly from those who use it (not governments or banks). Its value starts off at '0' but if it fulfills a need then value is afforded to it by that community alone. So basically, a whole lot of steem was thrown into a big pot and everyone was told to transfer it to others content (not theirs). At the same time a channel was opened up to traders to trade this steem money on exchanges if they thought it had value. So far they think it does because people are willing to give them bitcoin for it.
This is an approximation of what’s going on here. The future is going to be filled by thousands of these types of community valued products. This will not threaten the current financial system as some would have you believe. It will compliment it.
I think you are right, now that Steemit has shown that these communities have value and don't need some big corporation (which all started out as the same as Steemit was 4 months ago) to give it value and take all the proceeds for itself, we will see a lot more startups. If you look at the Steemit road map, there are already plans or visions to create many of these startups under Steem.
I'm brand new here; (as in yesterday) and am completely unsure of everything, but it seems to me that Steem arrives it's value out of the community of ideas, much the way the $ gets it's value from the faith in our form of government. The better your idea, or expression of it are, the more value it incurs ( think the U S government v. Zimbabwe, which issued a 10 trillion dollar note worth almost nothing).The more productive you are the more you should earn, as should be the case in any economy.
Thanks a lot for your info, i am new on this and yes it is a great time to live in! Good day people!