The potential for Steem and Steemit is huge.

Steemit can become the FB of the crypto world. It requires quite a bit of additional features and a major upgrade of the UI as well as native phone Apps and IMHO also native desktop Apps, the offline functions will help the frequent blogger/poster a lot. When Steemit can also land commercial business; Maybe even take fiat money from them for services and tooling provided to them to make Steemit another social media channel to interact with their fans, Steemit has the cards to sky rocket.

Steem potential is indeed much more then 'just' supporting Steemit/social networks. Payment will be very interesting indeed. In the end I think a few coins will be used throughout the world, and many of them will compete for being one of these. To become that payment coin, a lot is required. With BTC we've seen a very slow and still very limited adoption. Even the number of ATMs are very limited. POS requires support for the crypto coin as well. Steps are made by various parties with debit cards, and BTC ATMs as well as some POS systems supporting cryptos. But for mainstream adoption also the volatility of the coin is important to be reduced. The mass cannot and will not cope with the constant value crashes that we see with BTC and all the Alt coins. But in time, crypto will become part of our daily lives as a payment currency, and Steem can be one of them. BTW, I see another challenge for cryptos as a payment currency, the huge numbers behind the dot/comma. People do not like a price bing 0.000345 Steem or BTC. Steem is not having the value for those small prices but with the limited supply Steem will have, the only way to become a payment currency for Steem is to get values like BTC has, otherwise the coin is to small for such position.

HF19, I think this was a great release! Time will tell how the whole thing settles in, but I think for by far the majority of our community, positive things happened with the increase of rewards one can earn as well as one can give to others.

High Risk: Crypto is still at the start of what it will become in the future. It is before the chasm, ie it still needs to proof its position in our world. The cards looks good for crypto in general. For each individual coin, it'll be a little harder to predict their future.