Bitcoin Forum

Obviously there a lot of ways to answer this question but I want some smart views on what could legitimately hurt the future of Bitcoin or cryptos in general.

Technology:
-I am not a computer coder but could someone explain to me yes or no, is it possibly for a future technology like an advanced AI to crack the code for private keys in the future?
-Couldn't there also be a new form of crypto maybe ether, or maybe something more advanced to overtake Bitcoin at the top spot? It seems like there is still room for the decentralization of everything coin or something similar to be developed with characteristics that outshine everything on the market today. 
-Or could something be developed outside of the crypto universe that makes this technology obsolete?

Government regulation:
-I am not as concerned about this topic due to the inability for governments to actually control the currency, basically a situation where sanctions could be imposed but they can't actually stop the overall process of transferring coins. Is this assumption wrong?

Governance within the block-chain:
-Ok so I am not going to pretend to know a lot about this subject but I believe we have a fork in August coming up which has a lot of people up in arms it seems. Why is this such a big deal?
-Miner Fees are pretty straight forward but doesn't seem devastating as a whole, is this wrong as well?

Well I guess I have more questions than insight, but I guess that is better than "Is Bitcoin going to $1000 tomorrow?" threads.

Jeezy

Theoretically it's possible to crack any security system as technology is infinity. Hackers upgrade their skills and systems, so the security defense must be upgrade too, always, to prevent the enemy technology be more advanced.

If a new currency brings more features that people like, there is a high chance to have BTC replaced, but it takes time to happen and until now, Bitcoin rules, there isn't any AltCoin with real chances to replace BTC (at this moment).

I can't imagine any kind of currency or asset being created outside of Crypto-Currency world now. Crypto-Currency is becoming the trend of the world, until something new appears, the Crypto trend must finish first.

Even governments try stopping Bitcoin they can't, because people will use it on the "illegality", they will take the risks and continue using ad it's much more convenient than fiat. BTC is decentralized and pseudo anonymous, it's not so easy to stop.

I hope there isn't any hardfork.

Fees are expensive for me, nobody likes to waste money with fees and if it could be cheaper, would be amazing!

Cryptographic systems can fail, and some (of the past) have already proven to be insecure like SHA-1 (https://blog.qualys.com/ssllabs/2014/09/09/sha1-deprecation-what-you-need-to-know). AIs or deep learning sytems can probably help to discover these vulnerabilities.


Totally. Take a cryptocoin that can be scaled to the factor 100 or even 1000 respect to Bitcoin without risking decentralization (no segwit war), consuming much less energy and is more stable (Hint: There are already some projects that try that, but no one has proven that it works for the long term).


One thing I can imagine is an AI-based system that controls the economy and human needs and uses advanced incentives to "guide" humans to make the economy/world better. This system would also be used for "monetary transactions". Other possibility is that we don't need money at all anymore.

I believe it is right, because even if they use the most drastic measure and "turn off" the Internet, there are alternatives like mesh networks that could be used. A government would need a "Big brother" state to forbid that.

Chain splits (!==forks) are very troublesome for all people that use cryptocurrencies for other things than simple speculation. Imagine you use Bitcoin to transfer money between country A and country B and one day, all exchanges on country A are on a chain and all exchanges of country B are on the other chain. So chain splits should be avoided.


It can be a problem if there are alternative coins that deliver exact the same service (transactions in an advanced currency ecosystem) for a lower cost. But be warned, most altcoins of today are not capable of that in a sustainable way, they're only cheap because they have almost no usage.

There is also the human factor of "hubris". There are some that are thinking Bitcoin is already too big to fail and all the time and work put in to it has given it a position that it is secure enough that it can be hard forked away from Core. It takes only the brilliant minds to maintain and keep Bitcoin going, and Core has done a good job so far. Taking it away from them for a new set of incompetent developers, like BU, will break it. 

in addition to all that, the only other thing that can hurt bitcoin the most is its users in my opinion.
mostly the users who don't understand bitcoin at all. they see it as a plaything to make money only and make it fast. they have weird expectations from bitcoin and when they are not met they start thinking it is dead.
and one more thing is many who have started calling bitcoin just as an store of value. and this will haunt us in the long term if more people stop wanting bitcoin as it should be (a currency) and want it only as an store of value.

I think one of the biggest threats is Government regulation, because without government support the bitcoin will continue to run in place. Bitcoin will be difficult to develop and may be left behind its users. But when the government supports bitcoin I'm sure bitcoin will be a calculated commodity, bitcoin can be one of the financial elements in the world. And everything can change for the better than it is today.

People saying bitcoin will be dead is worry about future of bitcoin. As the raise of altcoins will washout the bitcoin in future. Example, Eth price is rising faster than bitcoin. Bitcoin takes more than 5 years to see the current value now but eth has much better growth than btc.

Yes mate, I don't just see only eth growth here but I must consider both of them were growing better with different situations appealing to investors. The only threat which I think is from bigger whales who will pull out their holdings and sell it all, in reasons that's affected from negative speculators that influence bad decisions. Bitcoin future will have to go a long way ride if we just be patience at all times, and don't be discouraged immediately; just stay focused and be positive.

goverment never can control crypto price or bitcoin price
goverment only regulation about use bitcoin is savety and under law regulation, money laundry, crime and more
not control bitcoin price

Cracking Bitcoin private keys are not that easy. They are very lengthy and cracking them will take infinite number of attempts by a bot. In order to prevent this from occurring, we can fork the chain, and make the wallet temporarily (may be for 1 hour or one day) de-active after 1 million or 10 million failed attempts.

In my opinion I can not see some major catastrophe that would take out bitcoin in the face of the planet, but the end of the world together with the world maybe some Blackholes would surely eat our planet to existence well that is in the end of times but maybe the impending split is definitely a big threat for other people in the community, well actually I am a part of the not very agreed with the Big blockers on what they would do to bitcoin because there is an impending risk involve, well I think that is a suicidal move in my opinion, well the other thing that I am thinking well some insane dude that want's to learn wow to destroy bitcoin (well I just read a blog about it) well that guy just sending all  his bitcoin to bogus addresses I don't know why he would think that way but he definitely wants to erase bitcoin data on blockchain.

I don't think there is a big threat to the bitcoin in the future as government has started to accept bitcoin and legalize bitcoin. So can expect good growth in the years to come rather than falling down to some other digital currencies because of increasing competence.

As the most valuable digital currency, there is. Even if the governmet starts accepting it is a threat to people using it. Just imagine what will the government do to maintain the users of bitcoin in a country, maybe they will try to create a wallet where they can track someone and look if he has a lot of coins.

If will take it seriously and regulations will be heavy, yes it's possible for government to stop bitcoin transactions. But chances for that is low since bitcoin can't really do harm on the whole financial system and I can't imagined that all countries will imposed a regulations like that to stop bitcoin transactions. If they saw bitcoin as threat in the first place, no such thing as learning about cryptocurrencies will be placed like what did for some countries that legalized bitcoin.

If majority of countries will imposed a sanction, then there will be noticeably decrease in bitcoin users in the world since merchants will be affected too. And if that happens, the market is not healthy enough that will result on bitcoin failure. But like I said it has low chance to happen but still it has for about 0.0001%.

The biggest threat I see there and would lend credence to is the technology behind bitcoin. Government regulation is something that will come and its in their own best interest because they cannot stop it and at the same time shut down the internet in other to stop crypto users so they would have no other option than to just fall in line.

Technology on the other hand could bring an end to bitcoin because everyday computer hackers whether sponsored or individuals are trying to break the code and find a bug the moment the are successful, then that is the beginning of the end for bitcoin.

The high fees, delays on transactions and the "eternal" thread of a hard fork are more worrying elements at this moment.

I think the biggest threat/problem for bitcoin is the nature of its investors and its volatility (which have a causal relationship).

Explanation: http://www.demoinvestor.com/articles/00000001

Solution: Bitcoin ETF/institutional investors buying into bitcoin, controlling the price

There's nothing as biggest threat to the future of Bitcoin if us users be positive minded. There's nothing wrong to be posutive all the time. Those people who talk about that threat is for us to worry our investments and to warn us to sell out bitcoin for others. But that doesn't matter just hold it anyway

So there is still a threat when people are negative minded. Everything has it's own side, it is not always the good sides, there are also bad sides. But for me, end of the world is the closest threat to bitcoin.

Technology improvements {increased processing power} can be mitigated by the implementation of stronger Encryption. So technology will be applied to technology to solve this problem.

Government regulation: can always have an impact, because regime changes can cause problems. Just look at the changes Trump are implementing. As you said, Bitcoin cannot be stopped completely and it will go underground when governments starts to enforce stronger regulations.

Governance within the block-chain: will always be a contentious issue, because Bitcoin is built on a open source consensus model. The positive thing about this is, if you do not like the code or the developers behind it, you can gather support and get rid of them. You just run the code that you support and hope the majority of the people agree with you that it is in the best interest of Bitcoin for you to do that. < If it turns out that it is not, people will just run other code that would serve their needs. >

There are none, think about it whatever happens the longest chain will stay the Bitcoin, what ever happens the majority will agree on a fix

And then deploy the fix, the only threat that I could think of is the governments buying as many Bitcoins as possible to limit our usage and

If someone has for example 18M BTC then people will have no other choice other than either buying at whatever the seller is offering or just

Use another coin instead then that coin will have a bigger total supply than Bitcoin and governments would have to start buying that as well

Then people will move to another coin and so on and on, governments will always have to buy the coins off the market while we just laugh

At them and earn our profits.

The biggest threat for bitcoin in the future is bitcoin it self. Honestly signs of it is actually visible. High fees, pending confirmation. You can't make something to be your current payment if it needs almost a week to sent. You can't use it if it need more than 2 dollars fee to send only 200 dollars.
It's not solve, and I think it can't.
A new crypto payment will born and replace bitcoin price. Not now but I believe it will very soon.

Bitcoin still has an extremely long future ahead of it, over a hundred and twenty years more until more Bitcoins stop being created. We definitely won't be here to see what happens then, but we sure as hell can make predictions now. I think that the biggest threats to Bitcoin, at the moment, are the high fees and lack of users. In relation to the lack of users, Bitcoin currently doesn't have that many users when compared to other investments such as gold and silver. However, the number of users is rising rapidly and soon, a lot more people will be using it. The bigger problem is the high fees. If the fees stay at this high amount or even go up higher, not many people are going to be investing in Bitcoin and the price is just going to drop. Hopefully the transaction fees are lowered soon.

Bitcoin is threatened to lose a lot of users when transaction fees get bigger. Many people increase transaction fees to speed up the bitcoin sent. I am one of the active users of bitcoin, and currently I feel disappointed because bitcoin is getting more expensive in transaction fees. If this can not be handled maybe another altcoin will be able to replace bitcoin in the future.

That is for sure mate, assuming that 21M Bitcoins is the total supply, what happens if some one(government) buys every coins from the market and

Refuses to sell to anyone? there you have your way of removing Bitcoin from the equation, what governments have so much of it is money.

And when price increases too much that mining would be only possible by starting a minimum of 50K equivalent of current S9 miners just to

Mine a single coin in 10 days, people will definitely move to another coin. so you could also consider the difficulty increasing way too much as

A potential threat for people to abandon Bitcoin in next 25 years.

it is said that the security of bitcoin would be compromised when quantum computing would be introduced in future.But it may take hardly twenty more years for it to be introduced.But we could hope that the core team would take necessary precautions to avoid such disaster.

The biggest threat imo is social engineering, psyops, spreading missinformation, divide and conquer tactics!
We already see this happening from time to time.
As Bitcoin can't hardly be beaten technology wise, this are the methods which will be used.
And the more Bitcoin will be worth, the bigger the influx of new uninformed noobs, who come here for the quick buck and don't understand the reason why Bitcoin was created in first place, the more likely it is for the attackers to be successful with this methods!
So it's to us to explain the newbies what Bitcoin really is about! Financial sovereignty for what a as much decentralized as possible base layer is a must!

Only the miner fee thing seemed really important for the future , as far as government is concerned it isn't going to affect much. Take the case of china itself unofficially it is illegal to trade bitcoin what i mean by this most of them are aware bitcoin is not allowed and government can do some ban or something anytime but at end of the day the most trade volume occurs on chinese exchanges

The biggest threat for bitcoin is unable to handle the transaction fee problem, with only this simple reason there will be another coin that able to replace bitcoin position and because of this reason there has been a rumor of forking, this kind of things can weakened the bitcoin and with the less interest from the users, bitcoin will die

Because the way to use bitcoin as a currency still far away ahead, long time confirmation and high fees become the major problems right now. After that problems resolved, we have to convince many people that manage business, merchants, groceries, stores and others to accept bitcoin payment. It will be different in every country of course as first world countries already have many places which accepted bitcoin payment. So, people treating bitcoin as store of value right now because its price increase significantly every year, one of bitcoin advantages.

There is no big threat to the bitcoin because of the altcoins that are getting more potential. Now this transaction fee issue to has got an solution with segwit2x activation by few mining pools. Forking or other splitting will never gonna cause defect in the growth as it is completely not supported.

I wonder if the anonymity of bitcoin will still remains if the government takes in-charge of it. Some banks doesn't recognize the bitcoins yet, others accept it. I think the government is the threat of bitcoins and other digital currency in the future because if will imposed some kind of regulation, i think some of the bitcoin users will begin to down concerning about their anonymity. This is just my own speculation if ever that happens in the future.

For now we are halving this issue but after activating segwit we will see what will be the cause.
Bitcoin will be still awesome choice to invest than the other altcoin since bitcoin are still acceptable by many site not only here in forum and gambling casinos..
Its impossible that bitcoin will be die in the future.. the developer are still doing their jobs but they are just need the opinion of miners what will be happen in bitcoin if they activate segwit through BIP148 or forking .. developer will be still choose what will be the best and if they don't test they don't see the effect or a best result..
Maybe will be the big threat in the future if there are someone can crack the private keys or bruteforce using more advanced super pc.. I hope it won't be happen in the future..

If your points are perfectly right then those threats are easily solvable as those are just part of every system and solutions are always leading to enhancements.

I big threat I am suspecting is Government/central banks interventions because they only may lead to big negative impacts. But I am sure those impact might give only short term effects like for one or two months as basically bitcoin does not need any support from Government/central banks.

i do not think so i am sure that at that time bitcoin will be more secure, because with the passage of time bitcoin also need amendment, and hope that we are not gong to face any such kind of situation in bitcoin life.

Do you think that a government could literally use the public fund and start investing in bitcoin,it is a good day for me as i am having a good laugh most of the time here as people will be commenting about things they really does not have a clue.The major threat is the lack of network upgrades and the delay it takes.

Currently I can't think of a threat for the future of bitcoin.

About the current fees, there are already proposed plan about it and this was being discussed for long time so I think even a bit, we can expect that fees and slow confirmation time will be no problem in the future. What else? Support from people? If bitcoin will be much better then I see no reason why people will not continue to use and support bitcoin.

But like I said, it's just for now that I can't see any threat. Maybe for the upcoming depends on the situation.

Mostly, like any other good business object, the problems are the people. They abuse the system, have unrealistic expectations and then get mad when those are not met and they generally jack the system up. But, it will survive and we will survive and we are all the better from day one because Bitcoin came around.

The biggest thing that will slow adoption is the need for confirmations.  There is also the fast changes in the price values and the fact that too many people dive into the game without fully understanding the facts.  There are many people that get a handful of knowledge and have just enough to make a mess of their affairs and then that is magically the information that makes it to the public news. 

I believe the problem of slow confirmations and highly fluctuating market prices are will be tolerated by highly knowledgeable adapter. Only those people who are getting into bitcoin ecosystem without gaining enough knowledge on different aspects of bitcoin ecosystem might be facing these as big problems. When people are having sufficient knowledge to understand how a new system will be working, I believe there will not be any stopping for the progress.

In my view, those ransomware hackers are highly vulnerable for damaging the reputation of bitcoin among common people and to politicians of big countries. We should not create any bad image for bitcoin that might lead to bad consequences. This alone seems as a big threat to the bight future of bitcoins.

the only possible big threat are the one created by the miners with their dirty move to go with creating their own alt, or doing 51% if they don't like the current segwit activation etc...

this is more dangerous than anything else, other things, can't really stop bitcoin, like government, altcoin taking over bitcoin etc...price also can't fall to 1 usd like many newbie believe, there is no way this will happen

everyone who invested above certain threshold will not sell his coin at loss, just think about that and you should not worry anymore about the value


not only that but exchange can stop any serious big amount of money temporarely, so you can't sell easily your coin, also with the current power of computer you can't crask the private key, in any way, not even with quantum computer actually

Biggest threat would be our own community.

even right now the community is pretty divided and the fork hasn't even happened yet. The 1st August thing is the User Activated Soft Fork for segwit activation. Obviously there will be division happening as hard forks(BU for example, or Segwit2x) could be activated as well, but i don't want to go into specifics here. Just make sure you understand that forks can indeed hurt bitcoin a lot.

Government has no control over bitcoin, the best they can do is shut down or outlaw all bitcoin exchanges, in which case bitcoin trading will simply go to P2P mode. There is really onthing they can do to actually stop bitcoin transactions.

Miner fees are a big issue but is still quite manageable. It's a short term issue as well, we will definitely find ways to scale in the future. I don't think that's particularly big worry but rather a smaller implication of the overall scaling debate.

Adoption rate does not slow down on bitcoin at anywhere. It is moving faster only as of now. Main problem bitcoin in future years. ALTCOIN. As altcoin rising in price range and usage limit expansion we cannot see much movement on bitcoin that time. Hopefully, high number move to ETH and litecoin I think.

Altcoin can indeed be a serious threat, when altcoin has many features and advantages over bitcoin then cryptocurrency users will start using altcoin. Bitcoin should be better developed if it does not want to be defeated in popularity by altcoin. ETH, Ripple and Stellar are one of the potential coins.

Government regulation and no other aspect could affect bitcoin.It would survive all such threats.But what i think the biggest threat to bitcoin would be Quantum computing which is said to be introduced in future.I hope that it would hardly take twenty more years for quantum computing to be introduced.

Bitcoin has successfully overcome al the threats it faced in the past and now it has completed its initial eight years.Some threats came from within the bitcoin community itself from people like Roger ver and Jihan wu.But the main threat would be bitcoin computing when it would be introduced after twenty years.It is said that it would crack the block chain.

Bitcoin has successfully escaped from all threats by bankers and governments,even threats from bitcoin antichrist roger ver and jihan wu.But it may face a serious threat when quantum computing will be introduced in future.It may take around twenty more years for quantum computing to be introduced.