You should understand the fundamental situation we are in right now as holders of any of the cryptocurrencies:

less than .1% of the general population are using bitcoin in one capacity or another.

The growth you've seen was that number coming from .00000001% (nearly a billionth) of first-worlders to the present .1%. Remember, 10,000 bitcoins would have hardly bought you a pizza when the adoption rate was so low.

The reason is simple: supply and demand. There are a limited supply of the cryptocurrencies, and therefore with an increasing adoption rate, there must be skyrocketing prices until it reaches it's true value, somewhere around $1M USD estimated to be about 2023-2025 by the current growth charts extrapolations by trends. This assumes 25% of westerners use the coin, with average holdings of $1000. This is a several trillion dollar market cap increase projection from current $250 billion market cap in a short time. It's a literal digital gold rush, and right now, you are in the first .11% of people to get on board.

Tomorrow, it will be a .12% saturation. That's already another 8-10% growth in your portfolio, just from holding, as your coin gets rarer. Imagine another year of adoption rate. Go to your favorite exchange and look at what a million people with a thousand dollars ( a billion dollars) would do to the price.

Then times it by ten.

Bitcoin isn't going to 9k. Bitcoin is going to 90k now through spring. It will probably break the $400k barrier by August or September 2018 as the adoption rate reaches the .2%-.4% saturation. The market cap should surge from $250 billion to $2.2-2.5 trillion by then. This is about a 1/4th of the global gold market cap. Which performs at a few percent a year, eaten mostly by fees and brokers. Bitcoin's growth is very attractive, and the Fear of Missing Out may be powerful enough to accelerate these projections, but there is no doubt they are steps along the way to something like PayPal's adoption rate, which is around what, 35% saturation? Could you imagine if bitcoin reached an adoption rate of 35%, over the .1% current? That's 350 times growth, 350000%. Probably a 3-5 year plan for a bitcoin holder.

That's what's happening: the adoption rate is growing everyday, as well as the market cap, versus a limited number of coins.