My prediction: Bitcoin will be remembered as the first successful application of a new wave in decentralized technologies. However Bitcoin itself will not be used except in museums, like the first Google server.<p>The revolution is how decentralized technologies from the past (BitTorrent, GNUtilla, DHT, etc) met with cryptography and game theory. Even more revolutionary is the wave of consumer-facing cryptographic identity tools, libraries, and browsers. By tying the notion of Public-Private keys to the metaphor of wallets (hence value) incentivizes end-users to keep and protect their keys. Decentralized Internet-level consensus combined with widely distributed cryptographic tools is huge!<p>Bitcoin's durability for years demonstrated the resiliency of these tools under the pressure of a hostile open Internet. It was the first serious test. And it passed with flying colors.<p>I DO believe that forks from the Bitcoin network will proliferate for a while. Bitcoin's technical and governance problems will doom it, but the value it has now will be distributed to finance other projects (e.g.: Ethereum) that will move the space and technology forward.
Financially it will continue to be a bubble machine and generate periodic spikes and pops that cross successive powers of ten in BTC:USD until in a decade or so it reaches a couple or a dozen trillion or so market cap ($750K/$1Million : 1 bitcoin). After that governments will start to really get worried and it's anyone's game. A few people with new obscene wealth will change a little bit in the world, but in general nothing will change.
Bitcoin will be doing something for a few years. Possibly high volatility which continuously decreases. But with a few peaks of excitement (positive and negative) when breakthroughs or breakdowns are announced.<p>Then, at some point it will start. At first only small transactions that nobody really notices. Very small hints. People ensuring that their wallet cannot have been hacked. Nobody believes them. Nobody really realizes that large cashouts are commenced.<p>Then rumours spread that indeed strange transfers exist. Transactions nobody can explain. Even the 7500 coins, believed to be lost on a UK waste dump, are now moving again. The cashouts increase. Rumours about a critical flaw in the concept of bitcoin circulate.<p>It will take some time. Then the realization sets in. Somebody out there has a quantum computer equipped with enough qbits to break ecdsa-256...
I was watching Bloomberg Davos live streaming. Every major Bank’s CEO was asked about their take on Bitcoin. It was like hearing a chorus, everyone was praising the block chain but no one had anything positive to say about bitcoin apart from the fact that it worked. Some pointed out the inefficiency of bitcoin to scale, which was quite impressive.<p>So there you have it :-)
What do you think will be future of Bitcoin 4 or 5 years down the line. I am not talking about cryptocurrency or blockchain, just bitcoin specifically. After hitting heights it has became more of a commodity/stock rather than a currency.
Not sure right now, we will see what happens with the lightning network and if that can help solve the speed and cost issue. As far as the price goes, hopefully it will bounce back after this shill...