Future of Bitcoin

Investing / Cryptocurrencies
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Thanks for your inputs, I think you are right, transparency is a net gain and we should not fear it: we will adapt and maybe come to fairer values out of it.

I do think this is a major paradigm shift for current institutions, including big governments and high profile leaders/politicians and I don’t expect them to go down quietly. My take is that Bitcoin and other cryptos have had it rather smooth up to now (I know it’s not been all sugar and honey and there’s been a lot of convincing to do) because they’ve mostly stayed under the radar. There could be more disruption in the future.

I strongly believe blockchains and cryptocurrencies are here to stay but I’m not certain of the future of cryptos as an investment. I find it very hard to assess their future value, partly because we don’t know which ones will face the more institutional backlash.

I’d say if we want to support a specific blockchain and invest in its technology, we should do so by running a node and/or actively participating in the system. If the purpose is only to make a financial investment, it’s very hard to pick winners and the best way to go about it is to follow the passive investing broad basket of all/most cryptos path. This, to me, would speak against going mostly Bitcoin in the mid-long run. I can envision making it a short term bet, though.

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I agree so far as we see that those are playing a big role in pushing today for bitcoin etc or are in finding themselves how they want to act with crypto, the way they can profit most. And a lot what was a hope with the internet revolution for the non-marketing part, I hear now as well. The shift will probably come from an another direction.

But I think, the difference could really lay in this public and international, uncensored space, where everybody can participate (sic. running your own node or like opening facebook or twitter or whatever every day and be in there). The difference would be that it’s now open without any restrictions for everybody (maybe for the next blockchain facebook, who has not the profit in first place in his mind). This time, the shift will maybe rather be pushed by some girls from a village in Africa or South America than the usual suspects from Europe, USA etc. We were focusing so much on the dynamics of our Western World, but the rest of the world is not waiting or sleeping.

Nobody knows. But staying out, would be no solution to it. Right now maybe generously speaking roughly 5% know something about cryptos. Less than 0.5% know more technically about it and much less are actively participating in it. My speculation is that one day, doing crypto will be like buying an ETF or voting for a political party (with your favorite coins, technologies, opinions and stakers/validators/maintainers etc) beyond the financial aspects. (there are projects which want to distribute all coins to all world citizens equally… imagine the potential impacts like direct democracy in the UN etc). Further my speculation is that BTC will replace USD in all I mentioned above. A bitcoin replacement may arise, but it will not happen in one day. So go with the flow. Future value… speculation over speculation.

(I mined my first bitcoins on a laptop 10+yrs ago, unfortunately no coins left or all lost or I sold some. I was not always, but always again technically interested in those coins and tech. Recently, I started to take some tutorials again on smart contracts adding more functionality with oracles or just testing some extensions in the browser with connection to the various test networks.
Where I’m heading: by just doing so, I had a list of about 30 ideas I have noted for further investigation. Some ideas were already somehow implemented in some projects, and some are not, but possibilities are endless… it’s a pity, that the day has only 24h. I think, what can be done, will be done… well not by me. The financial aspects of those projects are for sure a big incentive to further develop new ideas.)

((oh man… I spend quite some time in thinking and writing this stuff. I should have spent it better in creating the next crypto unicorn and bitcoin replacement))

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For what it’s worth, I’m appreciating it, thanks!

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Square and Ark released a whitepaper: Bitcoin is Key to an Abundant, Clean Energy Future

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Already been done:

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Utter bullshit.

Not only is it contradicted by real-world evidence but it also violates any kind of rational thinking, common sense and basic logic of economics. But I wouldn’t have expected anything else coming from ARK’s so-called “cryptoasset analyst” idiots.

I don’t know if it’s more depressing or aggravating to see (and read) this stuff spewn out by multi-billion dollar companies and investment funds, propagated on the internet - and inevitably being taken serious by some people.

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Some good conversations here :+1:

My two cents on what makes Bitcoin so special with 3 key elements, in my opinion and in no particular order:

1. Decentralized vs. Centralized

It is actually a difficult concept because centralization can come in different shapes. Facebook Libra/Diem is obviously centralized as you have a “central power” with Facebook. Ethereum is somewhat centralized as well because you have less nodes, a foundation and some key people working on it (e.g. what happens if Vitalik is arrested and the foundation is closed?). Dogecoin can be considered very centralized because the wallet distribution is really really bad (i.e. one wallet apparently holds 28% of all coins…).

Bitcoin full decentralization from the start allows to have no third party at all and a public access to all relevant information you are looking for. You can explore and audit the entire chain, you can set your node easily, you can read the protocol etc. It is not entire perfect as you have somewhat of a centralization of mining, but I trust it will get better in the future.

There is also a philosophical/political aspect to it, and I know it will go above the head of 90%+ of the people, but a lot of original adoption came from libertarian and privacy-minded people.

2. Technology

While I am not a big fan of Ethereum today, I still think it has a bright future considering the amount of developers working on it (or it might become to complex and unmanageable). Blockchains are technologies after all, you want to make sure that it evolves and gets better with time. Litecoin for instance is not a bad technology per se (it is a fork of Bitcoin), but the limited amount of development on it makes me think it has no real future, and same goes for the thousands of other irrelevant projects.

The amount of work behind Bitcoin is just astounding for a decentralized projects, with truly smart people driving projects such as Lightning network, Taproot, Schnoor, etc. These are very technical upgrades that you don’t need to understand, but it definitely shows the health of the environment.

3. Network effect

That’s what Cursino was mentioning with the first mover advantage, and this is massive. I like Nano, but I don’t know anyone that uses it. I prefer to use DAI but usually Tether or USDC are the preferred stablecoins. Cardano is interesting as the first PoS blockchain, but the volume of daily trade is really low. Network effect is really powerful, I would love to use Signal over Whatsapp, but there is just no way to move away from it entirely today.

Bitcoin is by far ahead of everyone when you combine market cap, transaction volume, number of wallet, developers, projects, information etc. and I don’t see how it could change for a very long time as, anyway, adoption keeps increasing.

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That’s super misleading, you don’t have images on bitcoin’s blockchain, it is just not possible to store them. And it is a public ledger, not the best place to hide something.

What you have is string of texts that you could potentially put together to decode them to find a URL where you could see the pictures and whatnot. I honestly have no idea how this could work and how to do it, and I would be surprise if the URL was not dead already.

Example of text you can write on a block with a biblical quote on block 666’666. I don’t think you can write much more than this:

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Then, nothing to worry about :slight_smile: . Today the eventual issues begin at the trillion level.

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If you have strings of text you can have any binary data, including images. Just use an encoding like Base64 or UUencode.

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Yes but what would be the size of regular 1080p image in binary code? Probably still around 100kb, no miner would put that in a block of 1mb and remove transactions for it.

I won’t do a search for obvious reasons, but I suspect it was a long time ago when the blocks were not full. And what I dislike is the click bait title that made you think that blockchain is full of porn pictures, which is simply not true.

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You almost got it correctly :smiley:

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While people are having fun with Doge, the future of Bitcoin is bright! Some great news from the past few days:

  • Lightning network is gaining traction with now ~20’000 lightning nodes running
  • Taproot activation (privacy & scalability upgrade) is progressing nicely with 55% of miners signaling support and a soft fork scheduled for November
  • Sotheby’s, one of the largest auction house, will now accept payment in bitcoin
  • Germany will let 4’000 existing institutions invest in crypto assets → probably the biggest news, let see which German institutional fund will invest first.

Ignore the noise, the free market will work itself out :+1:

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Just in, from their financial report:

The largest e-commerce company in Latin America, MercadoLibre just added #Bitcoin to its balance sheet.

“As part of our treasury strategy this quarter we purchased $7.8 million in bitcoin, a digital asset that we are disclosing within our indefinite-lived intangible assets.”

I guess they were not fan of the hyperinflation in their country.

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Only metal plan for now (beta test with limited withdrawals) but still huge for the adoption

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What the hell was/is this? :rofl:

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Ah the famous strong hedgehog signal!

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dipped a bit

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ARK‘s Cathie Wood joins 21 Shares AG (abba, abtc)

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-10/ark-s-cathie-wood-backs-european-crypto-platform-joins-board

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Do we have to expect a massive correction like her currently ETF :upside_down_face: ?

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Interesting: the EU puts a foot into the crypto world: