That's a low estimate. $50 by April/May, will close out the year way higher. Maybe several thousand times higher.
You have to look at utility. SBD links to the most usable and proven Blockchain on the internet. Once SMT's come in, Steem and Steemit will dominate the comments section of tens of thousands of smaller websites run by content creators who want a way to engage, reward and share with their own communities directly.
The future of next year's internet for Content Creators is all in the SMT White and BluePapers. SMT's are two years ahead of everyone else's thinking, just like Steemit is currently two years ahead of any other alternative Blockchain social media in actual day to day use and practice.
Once people understand that by following a Content Creator they like and engaging with them that they will earn money, just for commenting on that Content Creator's website, then there could literally be tens of thousands of New Communities springing up around SMT's. And all of that leads back to Steemit's pre-eminence across all of the web.
SMT's are a literally game changer. Verge's Wraith Protocol is great and will be the game changer this month, then next year the game changer for most of the year will be SMT's and will also be in the online games sectors which currencies like Mana, 1st Blood and Voxels are showing us right now. If SMT's take off like in terms of day to day use on tens of thousands of websites then $50 will seem conservative.
Bitcoin rose by 700% in 2017, Litecoin rose by $2,960% in 2017, Verge rose by 800% in one week last week (sure it fell back once the Bankers started waging their war but it's come charging back today). So when SMT's are implemented and people finally have them in their hands and start creating all the places on the Web that SMTs will allow them to create, then what do you think might happen?
Could it be possible we see SBDs become a universal web-currency across tens of thousands of websites? At which point would a growth of 5,000 or 6,000 percent seem conservative?
There are a number of blogs currently speculating that Ebay is about to accept Crypto as payment and that Amazon will possibly implement it too as early as February 2018. On Wordpress there are lots of plugins being developed to allow Crypto payments in multiple currencies and there are services like https://www.coinpayments.net/ doing the same. TenX and Monaco are starting to roll out Visa style "Bitcoin" Cards. 50 Plus of the worlds biggest Banks from Asia, The US, Japan and Europe have all gotten together to create a super-fund to stake Ripple including putting hundreds of Billions of Dollars into Ripple's escrow and putting hundreds of billions of Dollars into the 2017 End of Year Crypto market to try and dominate the space by creating massive Bear Market walls to block the progress of rising currencies like Verge and Next.
Cryptoluke. ("Someone bought $700,000,000 worth of Ripple )
So already this month the worlds Banks are pumping every spare bit of Fiat they have into the Crypto space. That means all the money in the world is moving into the Crypto space and away from Fiat Systems. If all that money flows in, right now the Banker's will use it to fund their Crypto war against every other Alt coin and when that fails and that money gets wrestled off them by the Alt Coin traders piece by piece then that money will still be in the system.
RE: 5 Things Pointing to an Incredible 2018 for Steem!