Dan Larimer isn't really a genius in inventing new things.
He has been a genius in getting those things created.
I envisioned steemit and bitcoin-like barter long ago. As did many others.
The trick has always been to get enough development and enough publicity to get the thing to point where it will live on its own.

Dan Larimer also has the inenviable position to try to explain these things so that normal people might grasp and utilize them. i.e. I tried to explain to a person what EOS and Ethereum was, and they thought I was talking about running a program on someone else's computer. "Doesn't Amazonium already have a cloud service?"