I totally can see an "eBay style" marketplace taking hold here... eBay was actually really cool during the first 5-6 years when it was almost all individual sellers and collectors trading with each other... like a giant online fleamarket-collectibles-art-mall. You could find the coolest stuff, and people just ate up the idea of it being "peer-to-peer" without a middleman. Since they went "big corporate" and public it has just turned into yet another giant online retailer and it's pretty much no fun anymore.

Steemit has the additional wrinkle that people here would bring an existing reputation to the table... a sort of additional trust factor. On top of which, the transparency of the blockchain and what happens with Steem wallets makes it so that scamming becomes a lot harder.