My banks interest rate is 0.6% P.A
Heat is 5% per month.
If the tech is good and you are holding 50,000 heat,
You are making around 2,500 heat per month,
That is 30,000 Heat per year ( estimation, i can't be bothered to do the accumulative interest calculation).
Lets say - and i know it sounds farfetched at the moment,
but lets imagine that Heat pulls it off & its market cap reaches 50 Million,
a) your $2600 stake is now worth 1 million dollars
b) after forging in year one, you are making about $50,000 a month or $600,000 a year
Your overall Heat net worth from a small $2600 stake at the moment, after year one is worth about $1.6 million
We can even be more realistic and say that Heat achieves Waves market cap around $25million
That is still $800,000, from a $2600 stake at the moment + forging for one year.
The maths look good.
I don't think your calculations are correct. The current market cap of heat is: 0.000073 btc/heat * $920/btc * 25,000,000 heat = $1,68 million
If hypothetically the market cap of heat would increase to $25 million, it means an increase of factor 15. So, your small stake of $2,600 would increase to $39,000 + value of forging - 5% per month gives 80% per year - so total value would be $70,000. There is a risk that all the new heat from the forging will create inflation, and that the price per heat may decrease because of this.
I think it will be much more important for the value that the devs keep adding new features, and that some new use-cases / partnerships are created which benefit from the scalability and the very high number of transactions per second (tps) which are possible. Imagine something like the first decentralized exchange built on top of heat, allowing for high-frequency trading. No other blockchain can currently do that (they all have too slow tps rates).
i got too excited...