Ok its time for some maths - I know a few posters have tried to figure this out but here is my stab. Feel free to point out any mistakes or inaccuracies, lets be constructive and suss this out. EC's will always be one tenth of a cent I believe. So at the current market rate of 2.80 dollars you'll have 2800 EC's per factoid. Now, I believe we started with 8-9 million (lets say 8.5) but obviously its the inflation rate that begins after M3 thats all important, and if I'm right thats set to be 73,000 factoids per months or roughly 880000 per year according to Brian. Now just to keep the number of factoids stable, we would need to use 880000x2800=2.5 billion entry credits per year, or almost 7 million per day. I think its reasonable to say that if you're using more than this, the price has to increase in order to get more entry credits from your factoids. If you use less, then the price must fall.
Now obviously its very early days and speculation is rife, but MalReynolds was estimating a quarter of a million EC's per day. For just that one company. Its plausible but by no means guaranteed that we could have forty companies doing a similar thing, in which case we would have a higher price. Of course its also plausible that some other companies (and there are a few although none are quite as far ahead as factom) will find cheaper ways of anchoring proof of existence into daddy bitcoin's distributed unhackable truth machine.
Thoughts?
You are echoing my own private musings except the number of companies would be 27 not 40 if you think about it. And I still don't know if a quarter million a day is accurate for the main company we've got.
Somebody was suggesting federated servers could mod the EC / Factoid exchange rate from a fixed 0.001 cent - is this true? Very bad for Factoid investors if true.
Who knows what future data rates will be. Nobody - and it's the key to whether owning Factoids is the deal of a lifetime or only fools gold. There's enough data out there to make us crazy rich that NEEDS to be secured on a blockchain - for example, daily torrents of illegal HFT bids (google the book Flash Boys and the company Nanex). WILL it get secured? We'll see.