First Baidu.com
Then Google.com
Then BTC = 500 USD
Add a few zeros. Really. (In your unlikely scenario but very welcome, that is.)
Why? Baidu is about 30% of Google's in terms of total user, and it barely moved the price.
Baidu has barely started using it. The important factor is how the government acts.
If 1B people find something which is available in 1M quantities to be useful, the math suggests a pretty high valuation on a per unit basis.
Bitcoin appeals to me because it is democratic. Users choose how it works by choosing what software to run. If the Chinese government tolerates Bitcoin and Western governments do not, it will become rooted in China and Chinese people will dictate the course of the solution. That is actually fine with me since the big decision to be made is how to deal with the looming block-size issue. I'd trust your average Chinese to make a rational decision on this farther than I would trust the Western high-schoolers and fuzzy-thinking Libertardians which permeate the solution currently.
The other reason it would be a welcome development to have much of the activity be within the Chinese sphere of influence would be that as an American, Chinese state sponsored network analysis does not really impact me that much. China and the US may do 'prisoner swap' type operations on data collection but it will have a level of inconvenience which will go some distance toward preserving my privacy, and would likely be relatively easy to skirt if I needed to. This is more of a factor if/when the block size is unleashed and we move to a 'super-node' architecture.
