I think the price is going to be around $400. It may have topped at several k$ in the meantime, but I don't see how the scalability issues could be handled in time for BTC to continue on its current exponential trajectory.
(I believe the current rally is an outlier and we are going to see much lower prices before seeing much higher prices, as well.)
(I believe the current rally is an outlier and we are going to see much lower prices before seeing much higher prices, as well.)
What scalability issues?
The 1 MB block size limit.
Why would this be difficult to resolve? I am betting all my bitcoin on this getting resolved before it becomes an issue
.Because to solve it requires a hard fork and there are members of the community who are strongly against removing the limit. Bitcoin could potentially fork into two separate, incompatible protocols who will fight over the bitcoin name.
I'm not well enough read on the subject to comment on the technical aspects of this particular scalability issue, but I refuse to believe that this will not be resolved. Bitcoin is designed such that eventually the mining block reward will be zero and the only thing that will keep people mining will be the transaction fees, which means that there will need to be an astronomical number of transactions at this time, especially as the transaction fees continue to move the decimal place over in the face of a growing price of BTC.
That's exactly why we need a limit of some sort. Unlimited transactions means no competition for block space and so fees will be limited to generosity. I doubt we can stick with 1 mb too much longer, but we need sensible rules about the growth of the limit that are nonmanipulable. Just removing it entirely will turn a limited resource into an unlimited resource, and that resource is supposed to pay for the security of bitcoin once the subsidy tapers off. When we lift it we need sensible rules and near perfect consensus. It will be a hard fork, so there is always the potential someone will keep a chain going on the old rules. This will cause mass confusion among people who barely understand bitcoin in the first place.
I'm not saying it is a showstopper, I'm just saying how the transition is handled will play a huge role in where bitcoin is in 5 years. It's everyone always trying to sweep it under the rug that worries me.
For some reason I'm having trouble putting the train of thought together to get this point rolling, so excuse the shitty transition as I start here.
I don't think that at scale, mining incentives will be an issue, even with fees that are significantly lower in USD conversion value than today. If bitcoin is as successful as what I'm predicting; with a $1 trillion market cap in five years; we are literally talking about millions of transactions per block. So you imagine that the fee in a few years is on the order of 10e-6 BTC, but there are 10e7 to 10e8 transactions per block, and now all of the sudden we have miners incentivized to secure the network with tens or hundreds of coins per block, where each coin is worth $55k+. This seems like a great incentive to secure the network IMO...
Yes, I'm pulling those 10e7 to 10e8 numbers out of my ass, but it's not that far fetched. We're talking about a world where bitcoin replaces a large percentage of credit card transactions, but also "becomes the credit card" for lack of a better phrase for hundreds of millions of unbanked individuals, replacing cash as a means of exchange for some meaningful percentage of the population. I googled around a few minutes and came up with around 20 billion credit card transactions per year, which is about 380k per block, so that's the order of magnitude of the lower limit. 7 billion people each doing multiple transactions per day; sky is the upper limit.
