Right now we stand at around $500 million market cap. With a quickly growing user base, a 20 fold increase to $10 billion in the next 12 months seems reasonable to me. This is one reason I am buying up and powering up more Steem. There's also at least one positive feedback loop I'm counting on. As the price goes up, the active users and new users go up, which in turn makes the price go up. Eventually Steemit will be talked about all over the internet which will further advance the market cap and user base. Hard Fork 20 also looks very promising https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/proposing-hardfork-0-20-0-velocity.
A community like Steemit would not exist if all of the users were just investors. I tip my hat to the excellent content creators here. There are some who have been able to quit work and do this as a full time job. Others have funded their world travels from money they earned here. This is not a bubble, it's a shift. Crypto currencies are redefining what a company is and improving on the power of the individual.
Eventually I also anticipate advertisers will create their own accounts on Steemit and fund those accounts with a decent amount of Steem Power in order to promote (either by upvotes or actual promotion) certain blogs. There are some who are against this, but I am very much for it. This will also serve to further raise the value of Steem as advertising will be a part of the demand for Steem on exchanges.
This is still early days. This is still beta. We are fortunate to be here. Steem on!
