My Case for a 100 dollar Steem in one year's time

It's been a thunderous start for the Steem currency in this young 2018, going from under 3 dollars to almost 9 dollars in a couple days. The current price sits around $7.50. I feel as though this latest price upswing only gets Steem to where all us Steemians felt it should be already. Afterall, Steem has a dynamite blockchain, currently processing almost 1.4 million transactions in the last 24 hours while running at 0.10% of capacity and the 3 second transactions are free. User growth is accelerating as the word is spreading about this magical system that will pay you for your work, big or small. Hell, Steemit went from 200,00 weekly users to 300,00 weekly users in the last month. But the Steem currency is not about Steemit necessarily, though I feel the market likes to tie the two together tighter than wallpaper. If Steemit were to fail, the Steem blockchain would live on through other projects like Dtube, Utopian, Busy and likely many more with the release of SMT's. So in one year, what does the Steem ecosystem look like at a 100 dollar token value? If you factor in 9% inflation, Steem's market cap would be 28 billion, so not at all out of the realm of possible reality in this market as long as the market stays strong. It looks to me that the crypto market is impacted less and less everytime a government acts against it. We all know government regulations are going to happen and we don't really care anymore. We've already endured a bomb "made in China" last September when the largest country by trading volume banned cryptocurrency 's altogether. I don't know about you guys, but my portfolio was worth 30% of what it was, but look at us now, the market has gone 700% from those lows to 762 billion currently. So government crackdowns arn't going to stop this market, so what will? Maybe a major crypto exchange will prove to be illiquid and a major fraud, or maybe a highly thought of unhackable cryptocurrency gets hacked. Remember what they said about the Titanic. In honest truth, lets hope nothing big happens, because if it does a $100 Steem may not happen.

SMT's , this is one of those things where you see a lot of different opinions. Some people feel they're a slam dunk, gonna be huge and others don't think as much. There's no question the demand is there for media to get away from their traditional revenue models and adopt this revolutionary way of wealth distribution. I feel there will come a point where business will need to tokenize their content or they'll simply be left behind. So this is a big opportunity and its there for the taking, its up to the Steemit team to execute on SMT's to become the leader in social media token issuance. As far as I understand, the goal with SMT's is to make it so easy to create your own tokens we'll see chimpanzees with digital wallets. The team will provide a service so you don't need a control room of programmers to launch your token. I think this is a great approach, provide a service, be a salesman, the Steem blockchain practically sells itself. If the Steemit team is able to execute on SMT's, then Steem will be $100.

Lastly, for Steem to reach $100 in a year we're going to need to see an acceleration of user growth. Currently there are 550,00 accounts. All the big player websites have 100's of millions to billions of users, so Steem has a ways to go. It takes time to build a community, and I have no doubt that the recent price movements will give Steem a kick in the pants, after all, posting on Steemit is worth a lot more now. We don't need to speculate though, the proof is in the numbers. Weekly users shot up 50% last month and the Alexa rank increased 400 positions after the last price rally. This creates a positive feedback loop where higher prices fuel user growth and then the influx of new users pushes prices higher and around and around we go. Because of this, I believe Steemit can achieve 3 to 4 million users in a year. Hardfork 20 will be important as it promises to streamline user onboarding.

As you can see Steem and the Steemit team have their work cut out for them but it is achievable. If everything I outlined above went perfect, Steem could be $200. If not, it could sit well below $100. Lets hope for a great 2018 and good luck to everyone holding Steem and contributing to this fine community.