This is one of the key questions .
This is where it is important to remind that blockchain is a foundation technology much more than it is disruptive technology that will give you a quick competitive advantage
Blockchain has today great intrinsic qualities like the ability to create trust among untrusted peers and the ability to secure integrity of transactions, but it has also many limitations and barriers to cross.
Scalability issues due to the consensus algorithms being adopted, cost of transactions as the system grows, or even barriers related to organizations not used to collaborate, or legislation and regulation not being able to cope with disputes, recovering from glitches or bugs. These are all big question and this is why it will take time until blockchain becomes ubiquitous to our economy.
Over the next five years I believe we will see more fragmentation in technology and approaches. We will see quick adoption in closed eco-systems. We will see many pilots and experiments, a lot of startups failing because they not succeed in building eco-systems and a few technology players emerging as the technology matures.
There will be plenty of challenges for Blockchain like adaptability, scalability, acceptance, legislation and regulations. Moreover another technology like quantum will pose threat for its expansion.
If Bitcoin flops in the mid of five years, it'll be setback for Blockchain acceptance. Overall, it'll be experimented in the closed groups. Few collaboration opportunities will arise especially in the banking sector or logistics and transportation .
Blockchains, if not attached to a decentralized token, don't interest me, and I don't see how they can interest anyone in this forum to be honest. Without a cryptocurrency, blockchains become MySQL databases.
Im interested in seeing improvements on the current damocle's sword of Bitcoin: PoW.
Thus far, all other alternatives have fallen short. PoS and so on don't cut it. Ideas like the tangle with IOTA and Byteball with DAG are good ideas but not really a replacement for PoW.
