hey dave I'm also interested in moving to portugal :)
facebook is doing what a corporation is doing: milking the asses of its users, observing and meeting up with blockchain advisers, and shut down the buzz about crypto within its walls of advertisments. Nothing drastic in my opinion.
Now they were looking at steemit, and beside the fact that there is a reward on the contents this plateform is lacking maturity in a lot of areas. The website is very very basic I call it a WCMS Wallet Content Management System the web wallet is good and has nice features and side projects, but the CMS part is very basic any php programmer will tell you that and anyone with a minimum of skill in wordpress can see it. Side projects and clones are also in beta and alpha mode so all of this is quite under construction, it even says it in the logo.

Steemit is not steem and the power of all of this is anchored on the blockchain and this is not compatible with FB right now. They might even choose not to use blockchain like IOTA did, however I don't have sufficient knowledge to tell you what alternative to blockchain beside IOTA's tangle system FB can have to implement their own currency.

LTC/FB pair I don't know LTC is good but too slow for scaling FB right now so I wouldn't jump on this affirmation too quickly...