Not sure but one thing I have noticed is that despite all the rhetoric about how "NXT is a large, growing community etc" the price of NXT relative to BTC has been in decline for the past two months. Like Doge there's usually decent volume but most of it seems artificial or "weak hands".
Thats because the Bitcoin ecosystem and economy isn't growing. Unless new people enter the ecosystem the price of everything continues to trend down. We should be looking at what is preventing people from entering the ecosystem.
I think part of the reason people don't enter it is because of political intimidation. The old guard of the Bitcoin community tend to be anarchists and very loud. The next generation coming after us will be increasingly less politically concerned.
When the Bitcoin price is rising then media attention rises as evidenced by the correlation of the search results to price. The main reason new people buy into the Bitcoin ecosystem initially is because of the rising price.
I knew about Bitcoin for a long time but it wasn't until it hit $30 that I really took notice. I realized it wasn't normal for it to even be over $1 but to be over $30? When Bitcoin hit $1000 even more people noticed it but then it crashed, a lot of bad news with Mt Gox, and the attention span of the masses is very short.
The masses will not pay attention to the ecosystem again unless the price of Bitcoin reaches an all time high again. If we want the masses to care about cryptocurrency, crypto-equity, and the whole ecosystem then eventually we must decouple from the Bitcoin community and make our community distinct somehow.
Unfortunately that isn't likely to happen. What is likely to happen is the only people who will use Bitshares are cryptoanarchists because that is what is popular on the forums. People who aren't anarchists are immediately going to be intimidated to even look at Bitshares.
So you have to ask yourself how are you going to reach the standard Democrat or Republican statist? One way to do it is to show how Bitshares can help them solve some of their pet political problems. If we are talking about a technology as important as the Internet it doesn't really need politics surrounding it because all that does is slow adoption.