If it does become a long-term trusted store of value, BTC should trade around $2,000,000 a coin (depending on how many coins are lost and are actually in circulation). That is over 100x the price of where BTC is today.
Where do you get this figure from?
Bitcoin has the basic characteristics of a store of value, the main one being a limited supply. It will need to have some utility for it to be trusted as a store of value so it must succeed in some form as a currency.
Why does it need to have utility apart from its capacity to move wealth easily avoiding bank charges. If by utility it needs to be easy to buy a cup of coffee with it I disagree. Although it's egalitarian in nature, avoiding brokers, it isn't simple and it relies on faith. Faith that their money won't just go poof or that its value won't drop like a blimp with a hole where the naysayers are sucking out value making money betting against.
It is not going to happen, future contacts are being used precisely to keep the price of bitcoin down in a very similar way in which future contracts are being used to keep down the price of gold and silver, the big advantage that we have over those markets is that many prefer future contracts for gold and silver since moving so much gold and silver is a problem but with bitcoin this is not the case, since we can move a huge mount of bitcoin to the other side of the world without any effort.
Yeah, like that case where the major investment bankers were all in a chat trying to plan what time of day they'd smash down the price of gold. They'd coordinate the selling of millions of dollars worth of contracts all at once just to set the avalanche down.
Gold bugs speculate that the actual price per ounce in the 10's of thousands but the futures contracts, which a bank can write freely without having any physical gold, keep the price capped around 1 thousand. They have a point--if there weren't so many shorts, the price of physical gold would be much higher. The same could very well happen with bitcoin (and already is as forex platforms allow CFD's)
It is hard to say anything regarding the nature of the bitcoin and that way it will behave in the future. Things are getting in a better shape and that there are likely chances that bitcoin will favour the most to the ones who are trusting the bitcoin and that they are holding it for longer time. The market worth of bitcoin will rise higher and that it will help the investors in making higher profit.