Trying to get a grasp of history and making some predictions. Improvements are welcome! I always thought that price might stabilize over time but I'm not so sure any more.. Though I don't see any reasons yet for Bitcoin to stagnate.
2008: Concept phase
2009: Launch
2010: Bug fixing
2011: Experimenting
2012: Acknowledged by the world, promotion
2013: Acceptance by small companies, turbulence, politics, super hype, venture investment boom
2014: Crash, hacking, acceptance by large companies, venture investment boom v.2.0
2015: Price recovery, merchant acceptance boom, acceptance by some governments
2016: World wide acceptance, network expanding, ATM boom, scaling war & Bitcoin politics
2017: Cryptocurrencies boom full spectrum, scaling compromise and solution, forking turbulence
2018: Serious cryptocurrencies development and altcoins finding their purpose, large network scaling, big fresh investors, price boom v.2.0
2019: Serious push for mainstream adoption in some countries, mixture of cryptocurrencies and interoperability
2020: Some Bitcoin and banking (FIAT) systems cooperation (banking long-term survival plan), serious world wide regulation and legalization attempt, Bitcoin banks (for legally lending Bitcoins for interest)
I think that this is quite a good prediciton, all the way up to 2019.
2020 is something that i don't think will happen, and shouldn't happen anyways. First of all, bitcoin cannot just cooperate with banks. There is no single person that is going to negotiate with the banking system. Second of all, why would the banking system want to use bitcoin, when it is direct competition, and why would bitcoin succumb to the banking system when everything that bitcoin is for is basically against central banking? Does not make sense to me.
2018 - First official BankCoin are launched
2019 - Governments start to regulate Open/Public Blockchains and favor PRIVATE centralized BankCoins.
2020 - Open/Public Blockchains are banned in most countries.
2021 - Open/Public Blockchains goes underground and flourish on black markets.
2022 - Ban on Open/Public Blockchains are lifted, because governments are losing tax income and votes.
2023 - Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency.
This is how I see it playing out in the near future, because governments think they can do what they want and will only realize what they have done, once they start losing votes.
Extremely likely that this will happen. China, russia are all trying to get their cryptocurrency up and running, even though they are centralized. I really don't think that it'ts going to be extremely popular, it's probbaly just going to promote bitcoin even more whilst generating little volume for itself tbh.