It's gonna be bitcoin for sure. It cannot be stopped anymore, no way. I think it will reach $1M (per BTC) before Christmas this year, but the long-term value is not so high.
we all wish this could become true. but...
how should the bitcoin infrastructure cope with that ? remember the spike a few weeks ago ? mt.gox couldn´t handle it. lag. laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag... panic sell lemming stunt. while at the same time bitcointalk went offline, bitcoincharts went offline, no more prices, other exchanges getting in trouble because users went away from mt.gox ... it was a desaster.
at 250 $
what would happen at 2500,- ? imagine the media coverage. everything would get really crazy at a 2500 level. but what about 25 000,- ? pure madness. it would be in daily news, some news would start to broadcast live from tokyo 24/7. people would go nuts. every scammer would sell to every grandma, people would start killing each other over bitcoins. how would mt.gox and the rest of the infrastructure do at this point ? if all this and much more complete madness is going on, what is to expect at 250 000,- $ ? mt.gox would be in smoking ruins.
let´s say mt.gox pulls all the way through 1 btc = 1 million $
if one cashes out his 100 btc he would have 100 mio $ on his account. (would sure look nice)
with the current rate of withdrawel of 10 000,- $ a month... hm... nice income for the next 833 years.
much more likely: failing infrastructure making it bumpy all the way up to.... (?)
I think that's what rpietila is getting to though: infrastructure is one of the roadblocks holding cryptocurrency back, currently. With the recent growth there is significant areas for individuals or groups to use their knowledge and increasing financial weight to aggressively remove those barriers to entry and primary points of failure.