Yeah, you're right about it increasing demand for HIVE but not at any price. The new users would be required to buy HIVE and power it up to be able to use the system but how much do you think they would be willing to pay for it in fiat? That's the key. By adjusting how many Resource Credits one HP confers a price for using Hive could be set. If the price of Hive were, say, $10, that 15 HIVE would cost $150. How many people would be willing to shell out that much money to use a social media platform?
The total is about 360 million now.
If Hive were $10 then the upward end of posts, the ones making the most money would be in the 5 figures range. Some hit that in the past when it was lower than $10. So I think a fair amount of people would pay to use a platform where a single post could gain them so much.
Although I don’t think the price would raise that much because if you have a lot of Hive now at .20, you’d probably be happy to sell for .40 or .60, definitely $1 or $2. I don’t think many would hodl all the way up to $10, so some balance would be met.
The distribution of rewards are so top heavy that the vast majority of would never make anywhere near that kind of rewards even if the price were $10. Asking every new user to pay $150 for a minimal ability to transact would be totally crazy.
$10 HIVE is entirely within the realm of possibility at some point in the future purely owing to altcoin speculation. STEEM topped out at $8.57 on Jan 3 2018. If BTC goes to > $100,000, then $20 HIVE is realistic. Because of the pandemic and the resultant economic depression that may not come to pass on schedule but it's entirely possible that it happens later.
The price won't go up slowly and steadily if the past is any guide. It will explode as a result of Bitcoin investors reinvesting their profits in altcoins that look cheap to them. What Steem always did was go up explosively and take its sweet time to correct.