The demand for EC's increases but the price for FCT's stays where it is. And of course, there is a total supply of about 8.7 Mio and that can potentially decrease for some time without that the FCT-price necessarily needs to change. There is still supply to meet the demand. But what would happen over time if the value for Factoids would never increase? The supply would go to zero...
That makes it economically impossible, even without any speculation on exchanges, that the value of Factoids would not increase.
I see it from the other side: If the value of Ec's is fixed how can 1 factom be worth more than the price of the one EC?
Just calculate it with only two informations:
1. There are about 8.7 Mio Factoids in existence plus 73k FCT's every month as payment for the federated server.
2. Every time somebody buys Entry Credits, Factoids are converted into EC's and out of the system --> "burned".
What would happen if there is a demand for 10 Mio Entries each month and the price of 1 FCT would be = 1 EC?
The supply of Factoids would be at zero after 8.7 Mio Entries (plus 73k).
Now imagine that Factom becomes a huge success with a lot of customers and millions of Entries each day, maybe even billions each month. And again my favorite example, even if it's extreme:
"People save 1 billion files every day to Dropbox's online storage service, Chief Executive Drew Houston said today at the Mobile World Congress show here."
http://www.cnet.com/news/dropbox-clears-1-billion-file-uploads-per-day/
And yes, a cloud-service is a different use case than Factom but it gives an impression about data-volumes. And dropbox is just one cloud service of many and it's just one use-case, while Factom is open for all kinds of different use cases - also in combination with cloud-services btw.
Factom already has promising partnerships and it's very likely that they are in negotiations with many more. And that's the case even while Factom is not a finished system yet, what makes it very likely that the number of partnerships will increase drastically after Milestone 3 and the number of entries will most likely explode exponentially.
Of course, that will only be the case if Factom will be a useful and stable system. If there should be flaws or even problems that are impossible to solve, it would turn out as failed and others would overtake Factoms position. But there are no signs that this worst-case-scenario is likely. I believe they will work on it until it's what they want it to be and my impression is that the team is a nearly perfect combination of skilled coders with a lot of experience, business-people, marketing-experts etc. It's really impressive. Kind of funny is that some believe to see a lack of PR because they don't understand that guys like we are not their target. They do a lot of marketing and PR, but they focus on potential customers, not Crypto-Speculators.
Long story short: If Factom will be realized as it's planned it will become successful. I have no doubt about that, even if there should be other high-quality competitors. And for now it seems as if Factom is leading. If Factom will become a success there will be a constantly increasing demand for Entry Credits and the price of Factoids will have to rise to meet that demand. That would be true even without any speculation.
Because, again: If the price doesn't rise while there is a high demand of Entries, the total supply of Factoids would go down to zero. And that... is the most perfect economical design I've ever seen and it also has a lot of positive implications for the market and speculators.
