I'm a bit like Faith in the sense that the true gravity of Steem and other crypto doesn't really touch me because I have yet to take anything out of the ecosystem. There are many reasons for this, one of which was the price dropping to the point where no one wanted to buy or sell at the meetings. That should hopefully change with the increase in the price.
I also wanted to avoid the exchanges if possible, and maybe start just selling $5 or $10 worth of Steem for cash (I've already bought Steem at the meetings, but I want to say that I have done both: buying and selling).
My goal is to start to encourage and reinforce the idea of why we are there, and build up small amounts of trust while not bankrupting anyone.
It does become real when writing a few blog posts and all of the engagement, and various activities on here do, in fact, start buying pizzas.
This has always been my issue with crypto. It needs to be a lot easier to convert to and from FIAT. It's getting better all of the time though.
Seems like a good goal to have. I guess it's difficult to really plan too much with crypto as it is so new and a little unpredictable but stability will come I think and hopefully us early adopters will reap the rewards.