3 years ago I would have laughed if you told me bitcoin would be $300 in 2014. what are you all complaining about
just under 5 years ago I read an article about something called "bitcoin" and I made a mental note in my brain that it would reach $1000 before or in 2015.
so yea.... depends on one's perspective and expectations...
I also assumed that improvements would be made to the protocol like cutting the time between blocks and other obvious scaling improvements.
I thought that if it hit $1000 by or in 2015 that it could easily go to $10000+ by 2025.
However, again I was under the assumption that the protocol would improve in its scaling factors.
Given the poor performance of the bitcoin dev's and miners to improve these scaling factors, and the fact that a lot of people waste energy on hacks to work around these scaling issues, I am less confident of it reaching $10k.
However I could see the coin going so low in value that the dev and mining community would risk a hard fork in order to improve those scaling factors as a last ditch effort to shore up this generation 1 tech.
thats why we have numerous alt coins
assuming that PoW is the decided mining method, you would need it to be an SHA-256 algorithm, to allow the Hundreds of Millions of dollars in existing equipment to be relevant. Interestingly, the brief paycoin rush demonstrated that with minimal co-ordination more than 20% of the bitcoin network moved over to an altcoin in the span of a week.
1minute blocks are the future, but come with a lot more blocks to store on drives, and i hope we see it become an issue by late 2015. right now the system works - improvement is second to security
Did you hear the interview with vitalik where he mentioned a two tier coin?
Like a symbiotic secure coin and volatility coin pair, where the volatility coin would provide the needed liquidity to keep the price of the stable coin stable?
Also some stuff about hybrid pos/pow systems, and how the miners really have no power in the system at all. If the wallet holders, the people that run the full nodes and the core wallet software decide to fork, the miners are kinda out of luck... can't even mount an attack at that point if you were to change to something other than sha-256...
Was very interesting to me, and thought it might be interesting to you, as a fellow miner. Hang on one sec I'm get the link
Edit*
https://epicenterbitcoin.com/podcast/058/@17:30 - forcing every miner to run a full node, eliminating the efficiency and centralization of pools, (not sure if this would actually work to fix centralization, but interesting nonetheless)
@33:15 decentralized proof of stake pools, kinda interesting, still doesn't fix the problem of large stake holders controlling a fixed amount of the issuance, but still intriguing.