@craig-grant I always thought Bitcoin had to go mainstream to reach $10,000 but perhaps you're right. In theory even if Bitcoin only remains a sort of fascination for top nerds and crypto-geeks in Silicon Valley it is very possible that some of these people will have enough money to push up the price.
But in my opinion Steemit or something like it which reaches the mainstream has much more potential. If you get 20 million people on something like Steemit that could be hundreds of billions in market cap and even if there is a max of 2 billion Steem or something similar, the amount of Steem inflation is not unlimited like some people claim and this means long term even a moderately successful Steem could be in the $100+ range per Steem.
And the scary thing is this thing grows viral. They have code ready which hasn't been activated yet that allows for a referral program where you can a kind of refer a friend reward program. It's the rate of growth that matters for people who are looking at profit from speculating and I think Steem has the potential for the fastest rate of growth according to some research I've looked into on viral spread.
As Steemit grows, it will generate memes and unique content. As the community gets bigger it will become easier to take things viral. As this happens it also takes Steemit viral along with any content which goes viral. Unlike Bitcoin where people are asked to "buy Bitcoin", it's a low barrier to entry and open to anyone who can blog.
"Community-based features perform the best among the
three classes. Predicting the number of meme adopters is a
more difficult task, but our network-based approach outperforms
other baseline models, especially in predicting memes with few adopters"
References
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/viewFile/8081/8154