13 ms·

Cryptocurrency in the 2020s

150 points by openmosix 7y ago

jimhi 7y ago
"Just like the dot com craze kicked off the idea of an internet startup (and a decade later, just about every tech startup uses the internet in some way), I believe that by the end of the 2020’s almost every tech startup will have some sort of cryptocurrency component." This literally already happened for a hot second, did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again?
- companyhen 7y ago
  DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the new ICO https://defipulse.com https://defipulse.com - 3m ETH locked so far as of today (1 year ago = 1.9m ETH, 2 years ago = 63k ETH)
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  I think it's much more likely that every tech startup will have some sort of AI component instead.
- zeroxfe 7y ago
  > ... did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again? I don't think that's what they're saying. I suspect it'll be more like support for existing major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Either for payments or smart contracts, or other decentralized book-keeping. I'm not convinced about "almost every tech startup", but I do think it'll become more mainstream.
  - jimhi 7y ago
    There is like ~5 million people using crypto right. I could see this being possible if that number was closer to 500+ million
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      At 500M it's already mainstream.
      - jimhi 7y ago
        That’s my point, why would a startup implement it if it’s not mainstream and can bring a lot of customers. Startups barely pay attention to China and India consumers, much less a cryptocurrency holder.
        hanniabu 7y ago
        It said it would become mainstream, and in that process there would be commonplace integration. Also, I think there's some confusion if you think the startups would need to pay holders.
- DennisP 7y ago
  They're talking about using cryptocurrency as part of their products, not just throwing hyped-up fundraising events.
- wslh 7y ago
  An alternative hypothesis is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is suffering the same luck as the Torrent protocol: the Torrent protocol is well alive[1] but never mainstream since most people use streaming services as most people use the traditional finance system. At the end it is about convenience. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-and-vpn-traffic-grow-explosively-191009/ https://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-and-vpn-traffic-grow-ex...
asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
Consider the source, right? How many people without a large vested interest in the propagation and uptake of cryptocurrency consider further growth likely? My guess is that governments will more and more realize that the main utility of blockchains is money laundering and speculation. As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existing technologies. I predict we'll see growing regulation increased amounts of crackdowns on cryptocurrency and its applications going forward.
- v64 7y ago
  I honestly don't understand where the perception comes from that this technology is only useful for laundering and speculation. Certainly it is currently being used for those purposes. But to say there is no imaginable use outside of that seems unwarranted. I've commented in the past here that the use of public blockchains to automate the functions of clearinghouses and escrow services will be a huge cost reduction for many industries such as finance. The technology as of today is not ready to handle that use case, but with the developments currently in the pipeline for Ethereum v2, progress is being made in that direction. If you look at what MakerDAO is doing with the Dai stablecoin, they've proven that it's possible to create a synthetic asset closely pegged to the dollar purely through financial incentives, and they did it all just using Ethereum v1. A holder of Dai can earn 4% APY through a Dai Savings Account, and a vote is currently in place to raise the rate to 6%. I personally find it incredible that an asset exists on the blockchain that's equivalent in value to USD, with a higher APY than you can get from any US bank. And because everything is on the blockchain, there's a public ledger of exactly how much is being collected in interest from those who are collateralizing their Ether for a Dai loan, how much of that interest is being paid to savings account holders, and how much is being collected by the system as surplus. It's the closest thing we have right now to a decentralized bank. Whether or not you buy into the technology, it's improving by the day and more and more use cases and applications are being tried out and built. If all you see in blockchain is money laundering and speculation, you haven't been paying attention.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
sosuke 7y ago
That was very optimistic. And $200k Bitcoin? Might as well suggest $2m Bitcoin and the odds will be about the same. I've become very pessimistic around cryptocurrency after a year of chasing coins. Wake me up when Turtlecoin hits $10.
- drcross 7y ago
  I remember people scoffing at the concept of 100 dollars per bitcoin like it couldn't possibly happen.
  - nobleach 7y ago
    I remember people scoffing at the internet like there no legitimate use-cases for it. "Yeah, we have places for information, it's called Grolier's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, and it's cheap!". "I already have yellow pages delivered for free by C&P Bell". While cryptocurrency may be quite a bit more narrow, blockchain is most likely a far more interesting technology.
    - vehementi 7y ago
      It is, but approximately 100% of startups (ICOs) formed around it have failed right? That's not to say there are none, but a fuck ton of people have tried to come up with cool ideas and approximately zero worked out, like at all.
      - rolltiide 7y ago
        Was the same in the second half of the 90s with tech/internet companies. Only in hindsight can you point to the 5 that didn't fail, but at the time you wouldn't have been able to pick them out from the lineup, or the graveyard, they probably weren't your favorites or you hadn't heard of them. Many programmers and sales people weren't able to get jobs and had to question their life choices. Its not so different with the digital asset and ledger space, fortunately this time it is just an extension of "tech" so there is no real drought for people that were knowledgeable in the niche.
debt 7y ago
Cryptocurrency does not have anything close to widespread consumer adoption. If the Coinbase’s of the world don’t fix this, cryptocurrency will be massively devalued.
- DennisP 7y ago
  Cryptocurrency can't have widespread adoption right now, because it's not scalable enough. Various projects are working hard on fixing that.
4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 7y ago
I’m pretty new to crypto in general, but it seems to me that the primary value of it in coming years would be anonymity/privacy. As I understand it Bitcoin has some problems in this regard, but others have solved it. I just can’t find it hard to believe we get to 2030 without a way to buy things anonymously online.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  > anonymity/privacy Nope. Bitcoin and others don't solve this at all. They're a literal permanent ledger of every single transaction you've ever made. Other coins might be better at anonymity, but BTC and its derivatives are certainly not.
  - ben174 7y ago
    Quite easily solved. There are plenty of services that will put your coin through an anonymizer, much like a VPN, or Tor.
    - ulzeraj 7y ago
      There is also coinjoin which is a service that mixes your coins with other participants. I also heard the Lightning network which operates on some kind of application level provides some kind of extra obfuscation.
    - hnews_account_1 7y ago
      This is not what anonymity looks like brother. Your IP address is not what links you to your bitcoin. It's your bitcoin address. And since we have a running ledger of all transactions, anyone can write a small script to trace your coins once they know even one of your addresses. The work around for this is what they call a coin tumbler - it takes your coins and those of say 5 more people, mixes them up real nice by moving them around a couple of wallets in many complicated transactions and then hands them back to a wallet you want from thousands of these mixed up addresses.
- dcow 7y ago
jrimbault 7y ago
I was thinking with some friends recently (new year's eve) : considering a bitcoin model with a fixed finite amount of currency, won't every coin be lost at some point due to storage failure/lost keys/etc ? Statistically ? And rather sooner than later, if my thinking is right ? Like the birthday problem ? There is a maximum of 21x10^6 bitcoins, imagining a 0.01 chance of losing 1 bitcoin/day ?
- duncan-donuts 7y ago
  As the scarcity increase would they become more valuable or less valuable?
  - zhoujianfu 7y ago
    Typically in economics less supply increases price.
- Geee 7y ago
  Yes, but every bitcoin is divided into 100000000 satoshis, and it's possible to add even smaller units in the future.
  - jrimbault 7y ago
    Who and/or what decides by what mechanisms and when satoshis would be divided into smaller units ? Doesn't that make it virtually valueless by definition ?
    - Geee 7y ago
      No, it doesn't change the value. It's just more decimals. A hard fork would be needed to make the change in the protocol. Similarly a bank can use whatever amount of decimals they wish to store their dollar amounts, it doesn't create new money. You can also divide gold into infinitesimal amounts. You can already send millisatoshis on the Lightning network, which is rounded to a nearest satoshi when it's settled on the blockchain.
    - deleted 7y ago
carleverett 7y ago
The most important challenge cryptocurrencies face is capturing real world value. The ICO craze turned out to create basically 0 value on any crypto platform, and the more recent wave of tokenized securities will be very slow because there are lots and lots of regulations that need to be addressed by token issuers (for good reason). The value of our public goods however is not being captured by any financial asset, and is a huge market that can be addressed by cryptocurrencies. This is something I'm quite passionate about and have put a lot of time into thinking through how they might work (see link below). As an example, AirCarbon (https://www.aircarbon.co https://www.aircarbon.co) is a Singapore exchange being built on an Ethereum token and will tokenize CORSIA-certified carbon credits for the airline industry. This is a fantastic example of a huge market ($100+ billion) that is right now extremely inefficient, and will benefit greatly from moving onto a globally accessible and permissionless ledger. It'll provide everyone in the world the ability to invest in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and even better, since the tokens also work as stores of value, investors can sell their tokens in the future. This type of financial asset has enormous potential. "Tokenized Goods - A New Store of Value": https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-new-store-of-value-83b91c53d436 https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-n...
Lerc 7y ago
>Olaf Carlson-Wee and Balaji Srinivasan estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin, more than half the world’s billionaires will be from cryptocurrency This misses a key piece of information. They take the price as an an assumption for their argument, but that is insufficient to draw this conclusion. When Bitcoin reaches $200,000 is also a factor. The worlds existing billionaires will not sit still. If it takes 70 years then it would be pretty easy to make better money elsewhere. I have no idea if or when it will happen. I'm inclined to think on average it will increase at a decreasing rate.
- chii 7y ago
  there are people who also believe gold will reach $100k an ounce. I don't think that will happen, or if it did, society would've transformed so much that there bears little resemblance to today's world.
  - paulpauper 7y ago
    it will take so long to happen that such time frames are irrelevant to anyone alive today
yellow_postit 7y ago
“Privacy” seems to be used as a buzz word here. I can assume but no concrete idea what the author means by blockchain with built in privacy features
- biolurker1 7y ago
  Google ring ct and zksnarks
- lawn 7y ago
  Here's a non-technical overview I wrote about how some privacy schemes work: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/challenges.html#privacy-and-fungibility https://whycryptocurrencies.com/challenges.html#privacy-and-...
waynecochran 7y ago
How do you fix their No. 1 problem: scalability? The blockchain updating, and certainly mining, are inherently slow.
- xorcist 7y ago
  Those are two different problems: scalability and finality. Obviously every transaction can not be processed and stored by everyone. That much is clear even to casual observers. There has been two or three main ways people have tried to achieve this during the past decade. The obvious thing to try would be to shard the blockchain like you would a database. This turns out to be hard to do in a trustless way since shards would need to interact. This realization and the contracts required to securely swap assets between otherwise separate chains leads naturally to: Full on separate blockchains that run in parallel to the main one, checkpointing when needed (rootstock, drivechains). These are not limited by the main chain and can be specialized for custom use cases. The parallel chains are only interoperable by way of the main chain and need not know about each other, which helps scaling out. Payment channels by the way of time locked contracts. Satoshi sketched out an initial implementation that turned out to be flawed. This has since been improved on and made bidirectional and made into a standard which is now the Lightning network. It has a number of real world limitations but the general idea is that only the parties involved in a transaction needs to know about it. An added benefit of this is that finality among these parties is immediate. There have also been some work squashing a large number of transactions into a large transaction. This has the added benefit of obfuscating the flow of individual transactions, which otherwise makes everyone's holdings transparent (mimblewimble, grin). This requires new signature schemes and is hard to retrofit to existing blockchains and make security guarantees about. There used to be ideas about Chaum like schemes on top of blockchains, but most of that interest probably went on into separate blockchain schemes. Those are some of the ideas that have been tried, most have shown some promise but are more or less still at the research stage. Don't expect radical changes overnight.
  - humanfromearth 7y ago
    Thanks for this. I was wondering about this exact thing. Any idea about the the current transactions/second with finality of the BTC or ETH? What is expected from the new methods?
notadoc 7y ago
Most predictions of the future are wrong
- cryptica 7y ago
  True. Also, aside from Cosmos, none of the projects mentioned in the article have actually launched. And Cosmos does not scale any better than any other blockchain. It may perform better than Bitcoin, but there is still a rigid upper bound in terms of TPS beyond which it cannot process anymore transactions (beyond which point fees would skyrocket to force down demand). On the Cosmos website, under the "Scalability" heading, it says "Proof-of-Work protocols are slow, expensive, unscalable, and environmentally harmful" but then it says: "Tendermint BFT fixes this." As a blockchain developer of 2 years who understands the principles behind Tendermint and who has build many scalable systems in his career, I can say for sure that Tendermint doesn't add any scalability to any given blockchain. It only aids with certain specific interoperability scenarios (nothing to do with scalability). The statement on their website is not accurate. The people who wrote this statement are marketing people who do not understand the first thing about scalability of any system. The leaders of these projects wash their hands of any responsibility by pretending to believe their own dogma. Most blockchain marketing is a flat out scam IMO. As a result of all this deception, almost everything that everyone knows about blockchain today is wrong. Everyone thinks that all the trendy cryptocurrencies can scale but they can't. None of the ones that I analyzed in the last 2 years could scale. And I looked at many; for those whose whitepaper made the most sense, I even made the time to discuss the tech with their lead developers, node operators and community members. The reality is always far behind the marketing. Unfortunately, investors are investing based on hype and their personal connections, not based on demonstrable facts. Investors are being mislead en-mass. As a developer who understands the tech and who actually believes in its potential to incentivize productive collaboration, it's disturbing to watch how the industry is unfolding.
christopherbalz 7y ago
Interesting research on stock-to-flow: https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a-ed6277b21760 https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a...
aazaa 7y ago
The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building. It's this kind of thinking that leads people into the dark thicket that is "tokens": digital instruments bought and sold largely for speculative purposes. It's understandable. The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age. The last two years have seem a solid refutation of this notion. Almost every token has lost value against Bitcoin. It seems reasonable to conclude that the carnage will continue. So the money printing press ship has sailed. It's going to come as a shock for many people (some with economics degrees), but bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. Any attempt to profit from the undertaking harms the credibility of the founders. Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise. Here's a vision for the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will extend its role as a refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. It will become an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance. That's your application for Bitcoin in the '20s. And it's a doozy. It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. There will be many attempts to "ban" Bitcoin. Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling." -Satoshi Nakamoto https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-s-heart-so-he-s-now-focused-on-ethereum https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coi...
Temasik 7y ago
Bitcoin scales right now proof: https://bitcoinblocks.live/ https://bitcoinblocks.live/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dnprock 7y ago
I have a different view of the 2020s. We don't need more tokens or programmable technology. Money is the dominant use case for crypto. We still haven't figured out how to make crypto money that people can use beyond speculation. Notable projects will be around money use cases. Currently, we see Bitcoin, Tether, and stablecoins. In the 2020s, there will be more coins that people can use as money. We'll spend the next decade searching for them. Tech-focused projects, like Ethereum 2, Algorand, won't be successful. Decentralized coins, Libra, corporate coins, government coins will be. For decentralized coins, I think the market needs to find a way to incorporate inflationary economics into the system. Bitcoin needs an inflating parallel blockchain. It's all about money. I put my focus there. I wrote a post on the topic: Emerging Markets of Cryptocurrencies https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cryptocurrencies.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cry...
- newguy1234 7y ago
  Check out open bazaar. It is a decentralized p2p market place similar to ebay. Even has a decentralized escrow system with moderators that get paid to resolve disputes. Best part of it is that there are no fees at all to buy/sell stuff other than the cryptocurrency transfer fees. You also pay a fee if there is an issue with the product you bought/sold etc. Not much people using it though. Seems like best selling items are gift cards.
  - bdcravens 7y ago
    > Seems like best selling items are gift cards. So either this is a way for crypto to be "used" for purchases at popular stores, or it's being used for money laundering. (those gift cards are easily sold on eBay and other marketplaces for fiat; this is how you'd take payment in mostly untraceable crypto and cash out without having to subject yourself to exchange KYC/AML)
    - Qworg 7y ago
      Almost certainly money laundering.
dragonsh 7y ago
This is a post written by a crypto company, which has all its interest in keeping it alive. Hopefully 2020 will be a watershed movement in crypto world and people will stop calling a peer to peer distributed exchange mechanism by names similar to money. Crypto is not money and company like coinbase thrive on that information asymmetry because a normal person do not understand that cryptocurrency is not really a money,but a network of computers trying to fix some arbitrary value to a sequence of string which are worthless in themselves if not widely used for exchange of goods and services. Hopefully in 2020 peer to peer exchange of good and services evolve and companies like coinbase don’t need to exist (this was the true purpose of distributed currency to get rid of companies like coinbase and being hold hostage by them by keeping wallets under their supervision without liability unlike the way bank maintains account with liability and protection).
seibelj 7y ago
Yet another thread for me to bookmark. Crypto is eating finance, and I can’t wait for a decade to pass to repost this thread. Good luck banks!
csscrack 7y ago
I just wanted to write 'hey, could anyone give a brief overview/current status of the crypto space' but then I realized once again that I might get answers influenced by personal investments (I've got still quite some significant portfolio). This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust-levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided for myself, this sector is over. Main reason is: distributed DBs are hard, publicly distributed DBs are even harder, there are so little use cases that justify the effort involved (except currency & fund raising). Maybe I am wrong.
- aeternum 7y ago
  "He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation." And this does not necessarily only apply to nations. Isn't that a strong justification for the effort involved?
INTPenis 7y ago
Like many have pointed out, this guy is clearly biased. But my own personal opinion is that people will always want drugs and as long as governments enable a black market of drugs, crypto will be used to trade drugs. I perhaps cynically believe that is what has kept, keeps and will keep cryptocurrency going.
lngnmn1 7y ago
> estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin what does it even mean?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cryptica 7y ago
The scalability constraint is a fundamental one. A single cryptocurrency cannot scale beyond a certain TPS without sharding. But sharding reduces the decentralization of each shard. Also, rebalancing existing shards when adding new ones also introduces its own decentralization problems. I think the way forward for acalability will be multi-chain. Each blockchain has its own accounts and own token but is connected to other chains via fully automated DEXs. The blockchains will form a hierarchy of chains with the most trusted and busiest one at the top. I think there will be a trend to make a consistent payment API so that any cryptocurrency can be used in the place of any other, online shops will use on-chain DEX trade price and volume data to determine which coins they accept and for what value.
yyyk 7y ago
Cryptocurrency tries to automate away trust, but in the process ends up reestablishing centralization while taking up a ruinous energy and complexity cost. Perhaps one day, the tech community will understand that some problems require a political solution and simply cannot be solved by technological means alone.

150 points by openmosix 7y ago

"Just like the dot com craze kicked off the idea of an internet startup (and a decade later, just about every tech startup uses the internet in some way), I believe that by the end of the 2020’s almost every tech startup will have some sort of cryptocurrency component." This literally already happened for a hot second, did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again?

companyhen 7y ago
DeFi (Decentralized Finance) is the new ICO https://defipulse.com https://defipulse.com - 3m ETH locked so far as of today (1 year ago = 1.9m ETH, 2 years ago = 63k ETH)
Hydraulix989 7y ago
I think it's much more likely that every tech startup will have some sort of AI component instead.
zeroxfe 7y ago
> ... did you not notice the everyone doing their own ICO when bitcoin was 20k? Are you saying it will happen again? I don't think that's what they're saying. I suspect it'll be more like support for existing major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin. Either for payments or smart contracts, or other decentralized book-keeping. I'm not convinced about "almost every tech startup", but I do think it'll become more mainstream.
- jimhi 7y ago
  There is like ~5 million people using crypto right. I could see this being possible if that number was closer to 500+ million
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    At 500M it's already mainstream.
    - jimhi 7y ago
      That’s my point, why would a startup implement it if it’s not mainstream and can bring a lot of customers. Startups barely pay attention to China and India consumers, much less a cryptocurrency holder.
      - hanniabu 7y ago
        It said it would become mainstream, and in that process there would be commonplace integration. Also, I think there's some confusion if you think the startups would need to pay holders.
DennisP 7y ago
They're talking about using cryptocurrency as part of their products, not just throwing hyped-up fundraising events.
wslh 7y ago
An alternative hypothesis is that the cryptocurrency ecosystem is suffering the same luck as the Torrent protocol: the Torrent protocol is well alive[1] but never mainstream since most people use streaming services as most people use the traditional finance system. At the end it is about convenience. [1] https://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-and-vpn-traffic-grow-explosively-191009/ https://torrentfreak.com/filesharing-and-vpn-traffic-grow-ex...

asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago

Consider the source, right? How many people without a large vested interest in the propagation and uptake of cryptocurrency consider further growth likely? My guess is that governments will more and more realize that the main utility of blockchains is money laundering and speculation. As has been remarked over and over again, they don't solve any above board problem more efficiently or with lower expense than existing technologies. I predict we'll see growing regulation increased amounts of crackdowns on cryptocurrency and its applications going forward.

v64 7y ago
I honestly don't understand where the perception comes from that this technology is only useful for laundering and speculation. Certainly it is currently being used for those purposes. But to say there is no imaginable use outside of that seems unwarranted. I've commented in the past here that the use of public blockchains to automate the functions of clearinghouses and escrow services will be a huge cost reduction for many industries such as finance. The technology as of today is not ready to handle that use case, but with the developments currently in the pipeline for Ethereum v2, progress is being made in that direction. If you look at what MakerDAO is doing with the Dai stablecoin, they've proven that it's possible to create a synthetic asset closely pegged to the dollar purely through financial incentives, and they did it all just using Ethereum v1. A holder of Dai can earn 4% APY through a Dai Savings Account, and a vote is currently in place to raise the rate to 6%. I personally find it incredible that an asset exists on the blockchain that's equivalent in value to USD, with a higher APY than you can get from any US bank. And because everything is on the blockchain, there's a public ledger of exactly how much is being collected in interest from those who are collateralizing their Ether for a Dai loan, how much of that interest is being paid to savings account holders, and how much is being collected by the system as surplus. It's the closest thing we have right now to a decentralized bank. Whether or not you buy into the technology, it's improving by the day and more and more use cases and applications are being tried out and built. If all you see in blockchain is money laundering and speculation, you haven't been paying attention.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago

sosuke 7y ago

That was very optimistic. And $200k Bitcoin? Might as well suggest $2m Bitcoin and the odds will be about the same. I've become very pessimistic around cryptocurrency after a year of chasing coins. Wake me up when Turtlecoin hits $10.

drcross 7y ago
I remember people scoffing at the concept of 100 dollars per bitcoin like it couldn't possibly happen.
- nobleach 7y ago
  I remember people scoffing at the internet like there no legitimate use-cases for it. "Yeah, we have places for information, it's called Grolier's Encyclopedia on CD-ROM, and it's cheap!". "I already have yellow pages delivered for free by C&P Bell". While cryptocurrency may be quite a bit more narrow, blockchain is most likely a far more interesting technology.
  - vehementi 7y ago
    It is, but approximately 100% of startups (ICOs) formed around it have failed right? That's not to say there are none, but a fuck ton of people have tried to come up with cool ideas and approximately zero worked out, like at all.
    - rolltiide 7y ago
      Was the same in the second half of the 90s with tech/internet companies. Only in hindsight can you point to the 5 that didn't fail, but at the time you wouldn't have been able to pick them out from the lineup, or the graveyard, they probably weren't your favorites or you hadn't heard of them. Many programmers and sales people weren't able to get jobs and had to question their life choices. Its not so different with the digital asset and ledger space, fortunately this time it is just an extension of "tech" so there is no real drought for people that were knowledgeable in the niche.

debt 7y ago

Cryptocurrency does not have anything close to widespread consumer adoption. If the Coinbase’s of the world don’t fix this, cryptocurrency will be massively devalued.

DennisP 7y ago
Cryptocurrency can't have widespread adoption right now, because it's not scalable enough. Various projects are working hard on fixing that.

4AoZqrH2fsk5UB 7y ago

I’m pretty new to crypto in general, but it seems to me that the primary value of it in coming years would be anonymity/privacy. As I understand it Bitcoin has some problems in this regard, but others have solved it. I just can’t find it hard to believe we get to 2030 without a way to buy things anonymously online.

djsumdog 7y ago
> anonymity/privacy Nope. Bitcoin and others don't solve this at all. They're a literal permanent ledger of every single transaction you've ever made. Other coins might be better at anonymity, but BTC and its derivatives are certainly not.
- ben174 7y ago
  Quite easily solved. There are plenty of services that will put your coin through an anonymizer, much like a VPN, or Tor.
  - ulzeraj 7y ago
    There is also coinjoin which is a service that mixes your coins with other participants. I also heard the Lightning network which operates on some kind of application level provides some kind of extra obfuscation.
  - hnews_account_1 7y ago
    This is not what anonymity looks like brother. Your IP address is not what links you to your bitcoin. It's your bitcoin address. And since we have a running ledger of all transactions, anyone can write a small script to trace your coins once they know even one of your addresses. The work around for this is what they call a coin tumbler - it takes your coins and those of say 5 more people, mixes them up real nice by moving them around a couple of wallets in many complicated transactions and then hands them back to a wallet you want from thousands of these mixed up addresses.
dcow 7y ago

jrimbault 7y ago

I was thinking with some friends recently (new year's eve) : considering a bitcoin model with a fixed finite amount of currency, won't every coin be lost at some point due to storage failure/lost keys/etc ? Statistically ? And rather sooner than later, if my thinking is right ? Like the birthday problem ? There is a maximum of 21x10^6 bitcoins, imagining a 0.01 chance of losing 1 bitcoin/day ?

duncan-donuts 7y ago
As the scarcity increase would they become more valuable or less valuable?
- zhoujianfu 7y ago
  Typically in economics less supply increases price.
Geee 7y ago
Yes, but every bitcoin is divided into 100000000 satoshis, and it's possible to add even smaller units in the future.
- jrimbault 7y ago
  Who and/or what decides by what mechanisms and when satoshis would be divided into smaller units ? Doesn't that make it virtually valueless by definition ?
  - Geee 7y ago
    No, it doesn't change the value. It's just more decimals. A hard fork would be needed to make the change in the protocol. Similarly a bank can use whatever amount of decimals they wish to store their dollar amounts, it doesn't create new money. You can also divide gold into infinitesimal amounts. You can already send millisatoshis on the Lightning network, which is rounded to a nearest satoshi when it's settled on the blockchain.
  - deleted 7y ago

carleverett 7y ago

The most important challenge cryptocurrencies face is capturing real world value. The ICO craze turned out to create basically 0 value on any crypto platform, and the more recent wave of tokenized securities will be very slow because there are lots and lots of regulations that need to be addressed by token issuers (for good reason). The value of our public goods however is not being captured by any financial asset, and is a huge market that can be addressed by cryptocurrencies. This is something I'm quite passionate about and have put a lot of time into thinking through how they might work (see link below). As an example, AirCarbon (https://www.aircarbon.co https://www.aircarbon.co) is a Singapore exchange being built on an Ethereum token and will tokenize CORSIA-certified carbon credits for the airline industry. This is a fantastic example of a huge market ($100+ billion) that is right now extremely inefficient, and will benefit greatly from moving onto a globally accessible and permissionless ledger. It'll provide everyone in the world the ability to invest in the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, and even better, since the tokens also work as stores of value, investors can sell their tokens in the future. This type of financial asset has enormous potential. "Tokenized Goods - A New Store of Value": https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-new-store-of-value-83b91c53d436 https://medium.com/@tpgwhitepaper/tokenized-public-goods-a-n...

Lerc 7y ago

>Olaf Carlson-Wee and Balaji Srinivasan estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin, more than half the world’s billionaires will be from cryptocurrency This misses a key piece of information. They take the price as an an assumption for their argument, but that is insufficient to draw this conclusion. When Bitcoin reaches $200,000 is also a factor. The worlds existing billionaires will not sit still. If it takes 70 years then it would be pretty easy to make better money elsewhere. I have no idea if or when it will happen. I'm inclined to think on average it will increase at a decreasing rate.

chii 7y ago
there are people who also believe gold will reach $100k an ounce. I don't think that will happen, or if it did, society would've transformed so much that there bears little resemblance to today's world.
- paulpauper 7y ago
  it will take so long to happen that such time frames are irrelevant to anyone alive today

yellow_postit 7y ago

“Privacy” seems to be used as a buzz word here. I can assume but no concrete idea what the author means by blockchain with built in privacy features

biolurker1 7y ago
Google ring ct and zksnarks
lawn 7y ago
Here's a non-technical overview I wrote about how some privacy schemes work: https://whycryptocurrencies.com/challenges.html#privacy-and-fungibility https://whycryptocurrencies.com/challenges.html#privacy-and-...

waynecochran 7y ago

How do you fix their No. 1 problem: scalability? The blockchain updating, and certainly mining, are inherently slow.

xorcist 7y ago
Those are two different problems: scalability and finality. Obviously every transaction can not be processed and stored by everyone. That much is clear even to casual observers. There has been two or three main ways people have tried to achieve this during the past decade. The obvious thing to try would be to shard the blockchain like you would a database. This turns out to be hard to do in a trustless way since shards would need to interact. This realization and the contracts required to securely swap assets between otherwise separate chains leads naturally to: Full on separate blockchains that run in parallel to the main one, checkpointing when needed (rootstock, drivechains). These are not limited by the main chain and can be specialized for custom use cases. The parallel chains are only interoperable by way of the main chain and need not know about each other, which helps scaling out. Payment channels by the way of time locked contracts. Satoshi sketched out an initial implementation that turned out to be flawed. This has since been improved on and made bidirectional and made into a standard which is now the Lightning network. It has a number of real world limitations but the general idea is that only the parties involved in a transaction needs to know about it. An added benefit of this is that finality among these parties is immediate. There have also been some work squashing a large number of transactions into a large transaction. This has the added benefit of obfuscating the flow of individual transactions, which otherwise makes everyone's holdings transparent (mimblewimble, grin). This requires new signature schemes and is hard to retrofit to existing blockchains and make security guarantees about. There used to be ideas about Chaum like schemes on top of blockchains, but most of that interest probably went on into separate blockchain schemes. Those are some of the ideas that have been tried, most have shown some promise but are more or less still at the research stage. Don't expect radical changes overnight.
- humanfromearth 7y ago
  Thanks for this. I was wondering about this exact thing. Any idea about the the current transactions/second with finality of the BTC or ETH? What is expected from the new methods?

notadoc 7y ago

Most predictions of the future are wrong

cryptica 7y ago
True. Also, aside from Cosmos, none of the projects mentioned in the article have actually launched. And Cosmos does not scale any better than any other blockchain. It may perform better than Bitcoin, but there is still a rigid upper bound in terms of TPS beyond which it cannot process anymore transactions (beyond which point fees would skyrocket to force down demand). On the Cosmos website, under the "Scalability" heading, it says "Proof-of-Work protocols are slow, expensive, unscalable, and environmentally harmful" but then it says: "Tendermint BFT fixes this." As a blockchain developer of 2 years who understands the principles behind Tendermint and who has build many scalable systems in his career, I can say for sure that Tendermint doesn't add any scalability to any given blockchain. It only aids with certain specific interoperability scenarios (nothing to do with scalability). The statement on their website is not accurate. The people who wrote this statement are marketing people who do not understand the first thing about scalability of any system. The leaders of these projects wash their hands of any responsibility by pretending to believe their own dogma. Most blockchain marketing is a flat out scam IMO. As a result of all this deception, almost everything that everyone knows about blockchain today is wrong. Everyone thinks that all the trendy cryptocurrencies can scale but they can't. None of the ones that I analyzed in the last 2 years could scale. And I looked at many; for those whose whitepaper made the most sense, I even made the time to discuss the tech with their lead developers, node operators and community members. The reality is always far behind the marketing. Unfortunately, investors are investing based on hype and their personal connections, not based on demonstrable facts. Investors are being mislead en-mass. As a developer who understands the tech and who actually believes in its potential to incentivize productive collaboration, it's disturbing to watch how the industry is unfolding.

christopherbalz 7y ago

Interesting research on stock-to-flow: https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a-ed6277b21760 https://medium.com/digitalassetresearch/plan-b-is-now-plan-a...

aazaa 7y ago

The trouble with this article is that the author doesn't seem to know what Bitcoin is for. Notice the vague treatment of actual cryptocurrency applications. There are lots of predictions about startup activity, "flippenings" and venture capital, but little about the goods and services customers will actually be buying, or what specifically startups will be building. It's this kind of thinking that leads people into the dark thicket that is "tokens": digital instruments bought and sold largely for speculative purposes. It's understandable. The ability to print money is a fantasy of many people from a young age. The last two years have seem a solid refutation of this notion. Almost every token has lost value against Bitcoin. It seems reasonable to conclude that the carnage will continue. So the money printing press ship has sailed. It's going to come as a shock for many people (some with economics degrees), but bootstrapping censorship-resistant money is a one-time deal. Any attempt to profit from the undertaking harms the credibility of the founders. Only the genuine scammers are left to continue the exercise. Here's a vision for the future of Bitcoin. Bitcoin will extend its role as a refuge from the growing foreign and domestic militarization of money. It will become an indispensable weapon against civil asset forfeiture, international sanctions, deplatforming, and mass surveillance. That's your application for Bitcoin in the '20s. And it's a doozy. It places Bitcoin on the side of personal freedom and on a collision course with some of the world's biggest governments, including the US. There will be many attempts to "ban" Bitcoin. Startups will play a marginal role at best because their ultimate aim of monopolization flies in the face of what Bitcoin was designed to do.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I find it hilarious you think Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong doesn't "know what Bitcoin is for." Maybe you don't know what it is for. People that are sane like Mr. Armstrong and Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used as a currency. If Satoshi is still alive I'm sure he was quite disappointed when Bitcoin decided to not scale past its blistering 7 transactions per second. "Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling." -Satoshi Nakamoto https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coinbase-ceo-brian-armstrong-s-heart-so-he-s-now-focused-on-ethereum https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@cryptodailyuk/bitcoin-broke-coi...

Temasik 7y ago

Bitcoin scales right now proof: https://bitcoinblocks.live/ https://bitcoinblocks.live/

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dnprock 7y ago

I have a different view of the 2020s. We don't need more tokens or programmable technology. Money is the dominant use case for crypto. We still haven't figured out how to make crypto money that people can use beyond speculation. Notable projects will be around money use cases. Currently, we see Bitcoin, Tether, and stablecoins. In the 2020s, there will be more coins that people can use as money. We'll spend the next decade searching for them. Tech-focused projects, like Ethereum 2, Algorand, won't be successful. Decentralized coins, Libra, corporate coins, government coins will be. For decentralized coins, I think the market needs to find a way to incorporate inflationary economics into the system. Bitcoin needs an inflating parallel blockchain. It's all about money. I put my focus there. I wrote a post on the topic: Emerging Markets of Cryptocurrencies https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cryptocurrencies.html https://bitflate.org/post/2019/11/10/emerging-markets-of-cry...

newguy1234 7y ago
Check out open bazaar. It is a decentralized p2p market place similar to ebay. Even has a decentralized escrow system with moderators that get paid to resolve disputes. Best part of it is that there are no fees at all to buy/sell stuff other than the cryptocurrency transfer fees. You also pay a fee if there is an issue with the product you bought/sold etc. Not much people using it though. Seems like best selling items are gift cards.
- bdcravens 7y ago
  > Seems like best selling items are gift cards. So either this is a way for crypto to be "used" for purchases at popular stores, or it's being used for money laundering. (those gift cards are easily sold on eBay and other marketplaces for fiat; this is how you'd take payment in mostly untraceable crypto and cash out without having to subject yourself to exchange KYC/AML)
  - Qworg 7y ago
    Almost certainly money laundering.

dragonsh 7y ago

This is a post written by a crypto company, which has all its interest in keeping it alive. Hopefully 2020 will be a watershed movement in crypto world and people will stop calling a peer to peer distributed exchange mechanism by names similar to money. Crypto is not money and company like coinbase thrive on that information asymmetry because a normal person do not understand that cryptocurrency is not really a money,but a network of computers trying to fix some arbitrary value to a sequence of string which are worthless in themselves if not widely used for exchange of goods and services. Hopefully in 2020 peer to peer exchange of good and services evolve and companies like coinbase don’t need to exist (this was the true purpose of distributed currency to get rid of companies like coinbase and being hold hostage by them by keeping wallets under their supervision without liability unlike the way bank maintains account with liability and protection).

seibelj 7y ago

Yet another thread for me to bookmark. Crypto is eating finance, and I can’t wait for a decade to pass to repost this thread. Good luck banks!

csscrack 7y ago

I just wanted to write 'hey, could anyone give a brief overview/current status of the crypto space' but then I realized once again that I might get answers influenced by personal investments (I've got still quite some significant portfolio). This space is difficult, after the last years there's some stigma and trust-levels towards and within the crypto-community are super low (similar to the porn space) and I decided for myself, this sector is over. Main reason is: distributed DBs are hard, publicly distributed DBs are even harder, there are so little use cases that justify the effort involved (except currency & fund raising). Maybe I am wrong.

aeternum 7y ago
"He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation." And this does not necessarily only apply to nations. Isn't that a strong justification for the effort involved?

INTPenis 7y ago

Like many have pointed out, this guy is clearly biased. But my own personal opinion is that people will always want drugs and as long as governments enable a black market of drugs, crypto will be used to trade drugs. I perhaps cynically believe that is what has kept, keeps and will keep cryptocurrency going.

lngnmn1 7y ago

> estimate that at a price of $200,000 per Bitcoin what does it even mean?

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cryptica 7y ago

The scalability constraint is a fundamental one. A single cryptocurrency cannot scale beyond a certain TPS without sharding. But sharding reduces the decentralization of each shard. Also, rebalancing existing shards when adding new ones also introduces its own decentralization problems. I think the way forward for acalability will be multi-chain. Each blockchain has its own accounts and own token but is connected to other chains via fully automated DEXs. The blockchains will form a hierarchy of chains with the most trusted and busiest one at the top. I think there will be a trend to make a consistent payment API so that any cryptocurrency can be used in the place of any other, online shops will use on-chain DEX trade price and volume data to determine which coins they accept and for what value.

yyyk 7y ago

Cryptocurrency tries to automate away trust, but in the process ends up reestablishing centralization while taking up a ruinous energy and complexity cost. Perhaps one day, the tech community will understand that some problems require a political solution and simply cannot be solved by technological means alone.