According to
this very early post made by Satoshi in the Cryptography Mailing List two weeks after Bitcoin was released, he believed that decentralized electronic currencies such as Bitcoin would be used for many different applications in the future:
I would be surprised if 10 years from now we're not using electronic currency in some way, now that we know a way to do it that won't inevitably get dumbed down when the trusted third party gets cold feet...
Another quote from February 14, 2010:
Right. Otherwise we couldn't have a finite limit of 21 million coins, because there would always need to be some minimum reward for generating. In a few decades when the reward gets too small, the transaction fee will become the main compensation for nodes. I'm sure that in 20 years there will either be very large (bitcoin) transaction volume or no volume.
And another one from July 14, 2010:
I anticipate there will never be more than 100K nodes, probably less. It will reach an equilibrium where it's not worth it for more nodes to join in. The rest will be lightweight clients, which could be millions.
One of the last quotes made by Satoshi in late 2010:
No, don't "bring it on" (Wikileaks). The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.
Satoshi probably thought that Bitcoin had a fair chance of being successful in the long term but he probably did not expect it to become so successful in such a short period of time. The growth rate Bitcoin experienced in its first 3-4 years would probably have surprised him and I doubt he could have predicted that it would become so mainstream so quickly. Notice how Satoshi talks in terms of decades, not years. Would he have known that Bitcoin would reach $1,200 less than 4 years after its creation and be accepted by major retailers like Overstock and Microsoft in less than 5? I doubt it.
