[msgilligan]

A couple of points about what happens if Bitcoin "really succeeds":

1) The most interesting aspect of Bitcoin is the possibility that it will enable previously unknown financial transactions and institutions. This means it's hard to predict the future value of Bitcoin, especially in the case of overwhelming success.

2) The value that Bitcoin creates in the economy is different from the "market cap" of Bitcoin. The former could be multiple orders of magnitude higher. The value created is similar to the concept of "consumer surplus" (and we have to remind ourselves that nobody owns the entirety of the Bitcoin network and all the value it creates, so there can be no "producer surplus")

3) Given point #1, we don't know what this future economy will look like. It seems likely there will be multiple institutions (services, etc) that leverage Bitcoin and there will likely be some successful competing/complimentary cryptocurrencies. Since we can't predict the structure of this Bitcoin economy it is hard to determine the "velocity of Bitcoin" which yet again makes it hard to predict the future value of 1 BTC.