Note still a looong ways from capturing the typical mainstream person who has no (even 2nd degree) relationship to crypto.
I'd speculate that 2nd degree connections are a good portion of the population as a whole, and certainly a huge portion of the population with any money to spend.
Most people could count a few dozen to hundreds of "friends" and acquaintances to whom they could introduce a social platform if they wanted to (especially if doing so on existing social accounts). Square that and it is between 1000x and 50000x the number of directly involved crypto-heads. You don't really need to reach much beyond second degree, if the product is compelling enough to grab and hold interest once people are introduced to it (currently, Steem is not).
Even if these numbers are wrong (first degrees will have a lot of second degrees in common, for example; I don't know the numbers), reaching the second degree is a sort of proof-of-virality in a way that reaching the first degree is not.
I'd also speculate that Steem has not done very well in reaching the second degree, outside of some particular niche cases like professional bloggers recruiting each other to come and collect thousands of dollars per blog post when that was the case.
You don't need to lockup your investment for 1 year weighted average cashout in order to speculate.
You don't have this massive inflation.
This is double counting. If you do lock up your investment then you don't have the massive inflation. Especially since liquid supply is now over 10%. SP are now effectively deflationary (though one risk is there is no guarantee that continues for any particular time into the future).
"Rube Goldberg", I kind of agree with and actual market remains questionable. I wouldn't say it is as clear from underlying principles that there is no market (as opposed to just a flawed/incomplete implementation and/or bad marketing), which in the case of Bitshares is something I argued with r0ach about way back in his Bitshares pumping days.