Steem is one of the best cryptocurrencies in terms of blockchain activity. It's even better than Ethereum, Bitshare and Bitcoin. That means it's the most valued coin and people use it very often. So it can go up in price in a very short time.
Also Steem is the main currency to power up in steemit to make our upvotes be worth more. So anyone wanting to power up has to exchange steem dollar to steem, that's why steem is more important than steem dollar.
Starting in 2016 steemit had just about 10,000 users, most of them were new to such sites and those who didn't understand it left. But those who stayed here, figured out how steemit works and believed in it, became whales. Now the whales can decide to upvote you to the top or downvote you to the buttom. They have a very good steem power that makes them able to do that.
In 2017 a lot of us joined steemit and made it grow till the number of users hit hundreds of thousands of steemians. A lot of minnows, dolphins and even whales were created in 2017. I became a minnow in 2018. Such big number of users make steemit grow even faster. Now steemit is one of the most visited 1000 websites wordwide and even in the USA.
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/steemit.com
I think the number of steemians can hit over up 1 million users near the end of 2018. Steemit will be a very high quality social network. It may not be free for new people who will join it or it might be harder to join. By 2020 I think we will have a few millions users who can over time turn into a billion members quickly.
You can see in the next chart how I see steemit in terms of number of members :
So, the more people we will have in steemit, the more the capitalization of steem and steem dollar will be. In the end of 2016 just about $20 millions were invested in steem. In 2017 almost $2 billions were invested in it. I expect that in the nearest time this year much more will be invested in it, approximately this summer. Maybe a few billion dollars, and in 2020 more than 10 billion will be invested in it for sure.
In the chart you can see how I think steem capitalization will grow by years :
If the capitalization grows, the price will also grow and we may see in the future the price of steem reach more than $100 per coin. So imagine how powerful we all will be. Most of us will be whales that time, so think about it and care about quality of your posting, keep building the community.