Basically you can think of the STEEM blockchain as the merging of a social media platform along with a central bank. It has properties of both

I like so much the feel of these words. A social platform and a bank, all rolled into one. Steem is not going to take forever to achieve 26M users. Word is getting out so fast about steem and steemit, you just sit back and watch the influx that would soon be , with alacrity. What it took facebook a decade to achieve, steem will achieve in a very few years. So your projection of $1000/steem is a very viable one, in the not too distant future