Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys,

Looking for different perspectives here. Where do you see Bitcoin in 5 years? Still number 1? Lost its market cap to a competing currency? More expensive than today?

It seems alot of alts are coming up now-a-days, which may end up taking chunks of BTC's value

You can talk about things like price, competing cryptos, market share

Would like to see what you all think..

Bitcoin has established itself as the poster child of cryptocurrency. Its future and bitcoins futures are hand and hand and no one other is going to take its spot.

The better question to ask is whether crytocurency has a future. That I am not so sure. The theory works, but the community so far too small at the moment. There needs to be a catalyst that will ultimately send it mainstream and I think we are on a crash course towards that point. The question remains is when it gets there, will the mainstream ever accept it? I doubt it, because there needs to be a "guarantee" or some governing entity to make the average joe feel safe. Bitcoin does not provide that.

 So while I do not feel it is going to replace the dollar anytime soon, it isn't going anywhere either. It will always operate as a trading opportunity and offer tax incentives, but don't expect walking into a major fast food chain and ordering with BTC. Sure there will be a few, but never widely accepted.

My .02BTC

I was wondering the same thing.

I think that it is naive to think that BTC will be the only currency around.
Some altcoin will succeed as well. LTC is over 31USD now.
Can't see why they will not be 1/4 price of BTC in the future, because It's is basically the same.

Why does your sig link to a scam site?

I added the website a long time ago and have not posted around here much since. Had no idea it was a scam site. Will remove. Thank you.

I don't necessarily think they take away from btc's value, I tend to think that they add a greater pool of liquidity that would otherwise be kept in fiat.
So in essence they can be considered part of bitcoins total market cap itself as their value is relative to btc anyway.

Only because Bitcoin is over 1000 USD now



What about NovaCoin and countless other altcoins?

It will be the first... But maybe someone with bilions of money could create something very new, advertise it and get all the profit.

This is assuming the only value a cryptocurrency holds is it's advantages over legacy currencies (digital, decentralized etc.).  That is only part of any given crypto's value, the other part being the infrastructure and miner/developer/user network built around it.

It's similar to saying the only value reddit has is it's source code.  That I could copy the source and create redditcopy2.com and they would both hold the same value and therefore have equal traffic sometime in the future.

I think your view point is grossly over simplified and is missing a big piece of the larger picture.

It's the MySpace of cryptocurrencies. The Facebook of cryptocurrencies will release in 5-10 years.

So you are saying that LTC now being 30 USD is a pure bubble because it doesn't even come close to the miner/developer/user network built around it right?

Its $100,000 in 5 years from now. $100 / mBTC.

Of course it is!

I don't know of a single thing I would buy with Litecoins at this point in time whereas I do spend Bitcoins on real things quite a bit.

Litecoin is a crypto-currency speculative bubble based on the speculative bubble in another crypto-currency.

Litecoin is the mother of all bubbles!

(yes, I am profiting from it.......so far anyways)

Ok, but if you look at the long term, why won't merchants start accepting it like they started accepting bitcoins?
Why don't you think ltc is a great buying opportunity for the long term?
I don't say you are wrong just trying to understand.

Because BTC is already there. Its like saying why don't websites suddenly switch all their HTTPS to port 70. It would be weird and random. Especially considering it uses scrypt making it inferior.

Ok, sounds reaonable but I don't think it will such a black and white division like BTC is 1 million dollars and ltc and all rest worth a few pennies.
BTC will rule. LTC will be second in market cap and maybe will have 2 or 3 more altcoins even smaller than ltc. seems more realistic to me.

why using scrypt is inferior?

Im not technical in any way but what about a payment processor/converter that automatically converts any crypto currency to BTC the moment the consumer and business transact. The merchant only sees BTC but the consumer still has the option to "pay" in LTC or FTC or whatever for example. Wouldn't that work?

I wrote a long post about the phases that I think will unfold for bitcoin over the next several years: The Four Phases of Bitcoin Growth (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=337151.0).

I think during the next couple years we'll see widespread adoption of bitcoin as an investment vehicle, first by hedge funds and accredited investors on Second Market as is already occurring, and later by the average stock market investor via the Winklevoss ETF. That should take the price up to a few thousand dollars per BTC.

Beyond that, to propel bitcoin to the next level there will need to be widespread adoption of bitcoin for commerce, charitable donations, etc. For example, I would like to see an extremely easy way for people to send bitcoin via Twitter, and I've come up with a specific idea for that (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=349445.0).

I'm coming from a background working in the nonprofit sector, and I think donations to charities and causes are one of the best growth possibilities for bitcoin. But it has to be so easy that the average person will not find anything about it confusing or complicated. Making bitcoin "idiot proof" is the biggest and most important challenge during the next few years, as we strive for mainstream adoption.

No, not what I'm saying.  Only that I think it's unlikely LTC will share the same market cap as Bitcoin solely because their code is roughly equivalent.  Following this logic you'd then have to assume every BTC clone ever created would one day share equal market share with BTC and I'd bet a lot of money that's not how things end up.

There is plenty of potential speculative upside to LTC and probably some level of future adoption, however I don't think LTC will ever be as common or popular as BTC and therefore is unlikely to ever trade at 0.25BTC for any length of time (barring some catastrophic event for BTC of course).

Or that if LTC does match BTC some day it won't be due only to LTC being "basically the same" but because LTC offered something that helped to compete with the network effect BTC is enjoying right now.

I don't think there will be Bitcoins in 5 years. The protocol cannot handle enough transactions/sec without centralization. Bitcoin will be superseded by another coin.

enlightenment is the key!

Heads - BTC passes the $100K mark and replaces gold in our financial system. Everyone on this site spends the rest of their lives congratulating themselves on being so smart.

Tails - Bitcoin crashes and goes back to obscurity.  Everyone on this site kicks themselves for the rest of their lives for not cashing out and taking very reasonable gains while possible.

If you remove these limits you may go around 40 tx/sec, but never to 10000 tx/sec visa scale, unless you centralize the network on few big nodes, and the rest have only a portion of the blockchain.

The UTXO set is still just a few hundred MB.  It is the only data necessary to verify a transaction.

It wouldn't be weird and random if someone were to use port 70 as a more secure port or attached some function that port 70 could use. To translate that into the crypto coin world, if there were another coin that provided decentralization and more security than bitcoin perhaps people would flock to that instead of bitcoin. Perhaps the developers of bitcoin could get together and come up with an alt coin that incorporates those functions that make that alt coin better. Perhaps they already have. ;-)