Topic: Where do you see Bitcoin in 5 years? (Read 3087 times)

yeah, 0,20 USD for sure 

who knows.

This is the future man.  The reason why so many bankers are scared around the world is because the flexible framework to use it as a currency.  I think too that in five years it will be mainstream, and hopefully more user-friendly oriented, specially for the masses. The more people that are willing to invest their time, not only to buy or sell bitcoins, but also to learn how it works, and how it can benefit them, the stronger and more ubiquitous it will be.  I see in five years crytocurrencies in general dominating the emerging markets with bitcoin on top of them.

Leaving out price.
In 5 years I would like most of my banking info Off-line. When I shop online it should be in XBT/BTC (bitcoin). If I pay bills online it should be bitcoin.

Organizations that lose too much money when doing projects in developing countries should be able to transfer the funds directly (siphoning of funds when sending aid happens on many legal, "acceptable" levels...never mind the shady siphoners).

 

Someday: Contracts- executable contracts: executed upon the use of a private key, potentially having the nature of the contract agreed upon BY the choice of which key is used to open it.

Bitcoin will be mainstream much sooner than 5 years.... In regards to price, it is reasonable to assume that we'll be Northwards of $10K...

It's also safe to assume that between now and then, millions of early adopters will have established a rather substantial fortune by taking advantage of the volatility that is almost certain to expand to both extreme highs and extreme lows between now and 2019.

So regardless of what the price is in 2019, we'll all be quite wealthy if we learn how to maneuver in tangent with this ever evolving market.

Does any currency have built-in consumer protections? In every case I can think of, it's just that companies hold funds. Since all online payments up to a few years ago were only permitted by centralized companies, they always put holds on the money. There's nothing preventing Bitpay, for example, from holding coins for 30 days and allowing buyers to do a chargeback within that period -- that's simply escrow. They can choose to be more like Paypal, where they have "loose" holds and permit receivers of money to redeem their balance more quickly, where Paypal often eats the losses and bans accounts and/or pulls money out of users' bank accounts where able. There doesn't appear to be enough demand from anyone to get BitPay to do this, though. No reason this can't change if people want it, though: there is nothing in Bitcoin preventing it.

Why is everyone so certain that the masses will be willing to use a currency with no consumer protections? Seems pretty optimistic to me.

~$0 

If nobody hacked it or USA doesn't ban it, I think it will be mainstream.

Mass adoption, internet currency of choice for certain demo segments

Price between $10k-40k

Everywhere. Especially in Europe and the States.

Online shopping website with Bitpay solution or equivalent

Exchange store (ATM or real store like anxpro in Hong Kong)

Price: Above $1000

Mainstream Acceptance: I expect more big companies like Overstock to look into accepting Bitcoin, maybe not so many individuals but certainly companies, if we have an even bigger collapse within this timeframe like I think we will though there may be a big drive for people to get into Bitcoin and store their wealth, it all depends on what the global markets will do

Applications: Stuff I suspect we haven't even thought of yet or imagined, ever since Bitcoin I keep getting surprised by what people come up with and actually set up.

Price: minimal 100k

The price atm is about 560$, granted it was up to 1200$ (?!?) but then again, people did knew the price will jump but not many have been willing to put money on that and risk it, and it only jumped due to hype about the BTC. Considering that BTC isn't that wildly accepted ( still ) price of >100,000$ is, well atm not realistic. I really don't believe that you will have billions of dollars in your wallet.

People said the same of $1000 not so long ago based on similar reasoning.

I hope you are kidding The price of $100,000 isn't going to happen considering that would be a jump by about 180x. Keeping in mind that some have few 100k in their wallets that would put them in FORBES TOP10 with more then $20 Billion

5% is a bit too much. I read something that over 200B dollars is spent each year by online purchasing, 5% of that is 10B dollars, in 5 years that number would be much much larger, so not i doubt it is going to happen anytime soon

But even 1% would be more then good.

I'm looking forward to new advances in usability. BTC addresses replaced with e.g. email addresses, phone numbers, etc. Memos allowing for e.g. proper receipts, specified change addresses and whatnot. Effortless implementation of simple contracts by anyone. Cast iron security.

Suppliers and international traders using Bitcoin would be great (giving merchants an opportunity to use the bitcoins they receive rather than having to swap them for fiat).

Professionally managed exchanges - where big money can move in and out quickly - and a host of other financial tools for hedging exposures, etc, bringing some price stability.

All within 5 years.

@p2p exchange -- I didn't mean to conflate p2p and ATM solutions, because I think the ATM solution will be relatively centralized. I don't see any of the really ambitious p2p exchange ideas ever taking off -- those decentralized protocol layer schemes. Maybe I lack vision. Instead, I think p2p will mostly stick to listing sites like LocalBitcoins.

ATMs are going to have a really complicated, capital-sucking time ahead of them long-term, I think, because I think we'll find we can't trust the exchanges in existence to not ruin businesses with slow turnaround time or by "accidentally" blacklisting ATM accounts (as recently happened with Bitstamp and the Vancouver ATM). I think, instead, ATM operators will bite the bullet and form their own exchanges (especially since many are forced to comply with horrible MSB crap already and already require large operating floats) which will have local, regional, or national markets depending on how laws work in a particular area -- I think we'll see "exchange disunification" for a while, where people generally don't use one global exchange to transfer multiple fiat currencies in and out for BTC. Lot of ways it could play out. Someone will definitely want to be arbing, so maybe there will be a quiet venture launched by Robocoin, Lamassu, or an ATM operator federation which makes giant stacks of cash by forming a "backbone" exchange which arbs with all the local, regional, and national ATM exchanges to ensure a relatively stable price across the world whenever there's deviation.


I really don't see tx fees being a big deal because altcoins have basically already solved it with relatively sucky networks, and I think just shoving more, cheaper transactions into blocks is just kicking the can down the road. Devs have never (AFAIK) pushed Bitcoin as a micropayments platform, and if usage continues exploding faster than tech can keep up, it won't go back to being one. It would be very expensive as far as resources for full nodes... kind of like an ultra-progressive tax where we let the wealthy first-worlders generously (or maliciously) control our nodes, and to a lesser extent, this is how Bitcoin is right now -- you need uncapped DSL+ (preferably cable+), you need a modern PC, and you have to want to run it enough to sacrifice hard drive speed, CPU processing time, and bandwidth to it (or pay for VPS/dedicated). In my case, where I rely on a mobile data connection, I'm counted as a full node by the node crawlers, but I'm really not because I started running my node selfishly by explicitly limiting Bitcoin's bandwidth to a point where it's not really contributing anything, only leeching.

In almost all instances, transactions cost significantly more to store and pass around than are paid in fees, so smart fees (unless they significantly increase fees on average) seems low priority and potentially detrimental compared to shrinking the blockchain and decentralized protocol layers which allow the combination of transactions to cut down on overhead. CoinJoin, for example, has major benefits both in reducing blockchain size, improving pseudonymity, and in cutting down tx fees dramatically. It's a major objective improvement to just about every aspect of Bitcoin, so that's what I'm really looking forward to. I think, to maintain Bitcoin's very strong network, there's also a need to figure out how to subsidize node costs (such as by a foundation mailing out copies of the blockchain on USB drives) and somehow figure out a fair payment mechanism for them (maybe just a foundation giving monitored full nodes a kind of salary, or paying universities). I worry about a trend toward capping Internet bandwidth consumption in more Western countries like is already seen by many less-developed nations (and some Western nations). The precedent set with the recent Comcast/Netflix blackmail is worrying, too -- "Bitcoin" won't be able to pay Comcast $400M to "fix" Bitcoin traffic, but it's too soon to tell if Comcast and other ISPs will be empowered to start really cracking down on "low-priority" (non-subsidized) traffic they can't adequately serve due to infrastructure inadequacies and severe over-selling on the ISPs' parts.

I think alt-coins like LTC and FTC (or Quark... whatever the new Feathercoin is) will have a more accepted and well-defined niche... they'll be relatively insecure, and it's where you what you want to keep your short-term spending money in due to the lower fees which come from insecurity (and lack of lite node wallet clients!). Weaker networks are where you want to do micro-payments; TANSTAAFL. With multi-coin wallet clients, I think that transition will be major and fast if major improvements to BTC like CoinJoin aren't widely implemented, but I have no idea when it will happen outside "within the next year." If we do see a major transition like that with BTC in its current state, I think it could make the VCs leave Bitcoin and either run away back to the sidelines or start wider-scope cryptocurrency businesses rather than narrow-scope Bitcoin businesses.

These are some good ideas. How can a P2P ATM based exchange work? I heard about an exchange which worked at the link level, but I did not hear anything about a P2P ATM based exchange.

Good post. About the protocol development it self .. what your opinion about Smart transaction fees ? ( http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-core-development-falling-behind-warns-mike-hearn/ )

Thanks