Just devil's advocate, Darkcoin went to like a 60 million marketcap just based off a Wired article in 2014, so yeah if a right formula can be found in marketing then it can definitely go up without real world usage.

STOOLMAN HUNGER FOR NEW SHITCOINS, FEED THE STOOLMAN YOUR FLOATERS, I NEED MOAR!

Just to add, the funny thing about Monero is the whole project was conceived as nothing but a butthurt alternative to the Cryptonote devs holding the majority of the coins (even though I suspect the Monero team holds a huge stash themselves and are indeed trying to get rich off it themselves but I digress....)

If people like cryptonote so much it would have been alot easier and faster to just give the original creators their Bitcoin they asked for on the exchanges and "buy them out",  let them be on their merry way and start distributing, selling and using Bytecoin as a real currency instead of waiting now more than a year for someone to create an acceptable clone.

I have to ask, which is more sinful, for the creators of CN to get rich of their creation or for early Monero holders profiting immensely when it was several dollars a coin while everyone else who buys or mines in late to the game start seeing their investment eaten away by runaway inflation? This concept of "fair mining" in the crypto world is an illusion, nothing in life is fair, some things are just fair-er than others.