I hadn't either, I've been considering this for ages but I really struggle to justify spending our funds on any non-essentials.. Having my steemit posts start paying out consistently has changed the game though, now I feel like it really is the least I can do with this opportunity. I want to do more ..

On the slow fiat - it's amazing how ridiculously ancient and slow everything is in the fiat world. After years in the crypto world I've become so impatient. Even BTC's ~30 minutes (for 3 confirmations) feels ridiculous after being spoilt with steem's 3 second blocks ;)

I'm an ether noob, I've daytraded it but never really explored it or wanted to hold value there for long. Uport sounds interesting , will check out how they're doing that .

I really do believe steem/steemit will become a central hub for peoples online profiles, and eventually we'll have a whole ecosystem of other sites pulling info out of a user profiles JSON metadata for use elsewhere. Theres a lot of possibilities for how it'll get used, I'm super excited to see where this all goes :D