Once you have a technology in place, it takes a very large improvement to get people to switch. In the case of pre-bitcoin it was Swift and Western Union. There was a incentive to switch based on no fees or very low fees. Today, SBD gives us zero fees, but the merchants that have become disillusioned with bitcoin because of the high fees are unlikely to start accepting Steem. Steem Dollars although intrinsically better in many other aspects is like bitcoin with only blockchain.info for a wallet. How many people would still be able to move their Steem/SBD funds if some government (cough cough USA) entity decided to shutdown Steemit? Nearly everyone. What would happen if this happened to bitcoin.it? Nothing, bitcoin has many wallets.

I would love to sell my Steem and SBD to people here in Argentina but liquidity is very poor. It is always hard to find buyers of crypto to fiat. There are no Steem/SBD gateways. There are Segwit Bitcoin to fiat gateways that make you put your id and everything. So, they are going to store my id on running servers. They say they are going to leave some bitcoin in cold storage but they will not do the same for the id I send them to verify with. Ostensibly the identification documents are for verification of identity, so I fail to see the need to even store them at all, much less online. So now ripio.com is a nice pot of digital scans of documents ripe for mass identity theft by any hacker that can get in. That site and satoshitango.com are the only two sites in this country that do this crypto to fiat exchange.

Neither of these exchanges work with anything but the inefficient, slow, high fee Segwit Bitcoin unfortunately. So, suppose we say yeah fiat sucks and the people are going to buy into bitcoin because they don't know any better or they need to get into bitcoin first even if they do. They use an exchange and defeat the whole point of crypto-currency.

I do think these sites you mentioned give the SBD some acceptance it needs. The first market advantage was squandered by Segwit Bitcoin devs but now users of crypto have thousands of other currencies to choose from.