Bitcoin Forum

I want to know what you guys think will be the biggest event for bitcoin in the next 5 years. What problems will be solved, what problems will arise, will mining centralize more (maybe in the US?) or disperse across the globe? When we talk about "bitcoin transactions", will we be referring to on-chain, or lightning transactions (i.e will lightning be more relevant to the avg user than on-chain)?

Are there any contentious BIPs, that could force another block-size type war? If there are none currently, what part of the protocol do you suspect may eventually lead to the next hard fork?

Please don't reply "the biggest event will be btc mooning/hitting 100k", I will delete those, and all other replies that are not constructive.

I do think in the upcoming years we will see the following changes :-

1. Greener mining
2. More acceptance
3. Better developed lighting network
4. Less transaction fee
5. New and better forks to make sure the problems regarding transactions are solved
6. Price reaching a new all time high

Other than that I do think due to pandemic people have already realized the importance of Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. They will continue to flourish in the upcoming years and there will be more universities focusing on them in terms of educating young individuals about the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

The mining centralization is a big discussion. I believe that it won't have a standard increase or decrease, so I highly doubt a 51% attack from a pool. Even if a pool owns the majority of the computational power it won't attack the network, because it won't be beneficial. Although, the whole point is ruined, then, so let's praise for that to never happen. Can you imagine the FUD? I guess that once the miners see such case, they'll switch the pool the work on.

Bitcoin can't work if we broadcast each transaction we make. It's practically incorrect. The Lightning network must sooner or later be applied for making the whole thing practical. In the end of this decade, assuming that Bitcoin has reached $10M, which doesn't seem impossible to me, a transaction may worth hundreds of dollars to be made. The average user will have to be adapt with it.

None that I have in mind.

The problem with secp256k1 will surely create a hard fork. I just don't know if it'll be the next one.

The last halving was in 2020, this means the next halving will be in 2024. We know how people do fomo, people will fomo and buy bitcoin some days before halving and many days after halving. This will be the period of another rapid growth for bitcoin just because people fomo. Aside this, I do not know any other thing that might happen but always know that bitcoin has a brighter future.

The only reason I'm not worried about holding another 5 years (I don't have huge amounts invested, around $10k) is because so many institutional investors have jumped aboard.
Actual hedge funds and funds listed on American stock exchanges.

These whales dumping $500m+ into permanent Bitcoin holdings which they report as assets quarterly is nothing to scoff at.
If the market suffers so will they.

I have followed the same strategy with Berkshire Hathaway A series stocks (Warren Buffett's investment company). Check their price history on Google.
They do the most due diligence out of any investment company in the world. Their analysis is worth pure gold in its weight.

I have a portfolio dedicated to fully emulating Berkshire Hathaway stock ownership and it has paid off very nicely in the last 5 years.

Why do I think emulating big institutional investors is such a good move? Because they have so much to lose.
They have done a stupifying amount of analysis and forecasts to justify dumping hundreds of millions if not billions into these assets.

So am I worried about my bitcoin holdings long term? Not really. We can revisit this thread in 5 years.
At the time of this post on May 2021, the price per BTC was 32k each.

My earliest investments into BTC were at less than $100 each. I have sold off a lot. I haven't been holding until today.

For what problems would be solved; I believe the main hiccup using Bitcoin is scalability and volatility. Volatilois not much of an issue as it gives it speculative value, and I personally do not see it reducing in the future (in relation to fiat), we could at a time be seeing $5k candles +/- when Bitcoin hits a far higher price. There are lots of proposals to fix the scalability issue, so I'll expect something to change with the next five years.
For what problems would arise; my major concern in privacy issues. Centralized exchanges are getting more popular and this could pose a major privacy problem as governments seeks for ways to control the network.

Off chain txs cannot replace on chain ones as it has to interact with the network at some point. Although, I expect LN to get more popular.

Well, because of the bitcoin halving that usually occurs right after 4 years estimated, and then bitcoin price will effect after approximately 1 year, so a total of 5 years waiting for the best result of bitcoin price is the perfect time to hold and sell if you think it is worth it to sell, At that moment, it was expected that there will always a new ATH will happen. I don't have enough technical skills on how those transactions will work in bitcoin but I think the fees will still depend on the demand and the supply of bitcoin and when there are too many transactions made a cause of workload to the network, and right -- of chain transaction will help to reduce the fee but it seems there is a risky part that is why it is not widely adopted.

Taproot is the next big thing. It will unlock many new capabilities and enable more secure and more efficient transactions.

I think we are going to see more adoption and more regulations over the following years. Consequently there will be a lot of growth in both popularity and efficiency of decentralized exchanges as the demand for them rises specially to trade altcoins against bitcoin.
I also hope for more adoption of second layer so that we can see less spam on-chain from big centralized services such as exchanges and gambling sites that would help scaling a lot.

If you look at the way mining has been spreading across the globe and becoming more and more decentralized every year you realize that the trend will continue. I also don't see any reason why it should reverse.

On-chain transactions will always be more relevant than second layer, and that will never change.

I believe that we do need a hard fork to increase the block capacity at some point, I don't know if it will lead to another long drama though.

Well that is also one of the big events. The target is also $1 million in 5 years, not $100k. Also price is a good indicator for adoption.

I also believe that hard fork increasing the max block size will occur over the next 5-10 years. It will be much more contentious than the segwit fork and lead to a protracted soul-draining war. The saddest part is that although everyone will agree with the technical merits for a size limit increase, the strongest objections will be based solely on small-blocker dogma.

I believe the end result will be a permanent split similar to BTC/BCH and ETH/ETC, with Bitcoin (BTC) taking the branch with the bigger blocks.

Could you expand on this?

This is interesting, I haven't heard much talk about larger blocks AND second layer, the conversation has always seemed pretty binary.
What makes you suspect the answer is a combination of the two, and in which order do you think the changes need to occur?

In the event that BTC's block size increases, do you think BCH users and miners will return and/or help big blockers in the fight? I'm a bit skeptical that bitcoin will go down the big block road because of how everything played out last time... however, big blocks seemed to be more popular among commercial players and with institutional investors coming in, companies like blockstream might have less of a say this time around...

Solved problem:  The inflation problem. Bitcoin has slowed inflation in the US by being a competitor currency. The US inflation problem could still get well out of hand, which no one should wish for.

The biggest problem might be that bitcoin isn't good for your coffee transactions as it currently stands. I could see banks stepping in to fill this role. What if a state issued a physical currency and backed it by bitcoin?

Problems that arise: It will be too valuable too quickly. If it rises too fast and for too long without having a period to relax, people would speculate on more than their homes. Fast rises burst, liquidating an increasing number of people chasing their moon.

Mining centralization: Who cares? Nodes are distributed across 10k+ computers. That's much more important. These are very distributed, although the majority of nodes are in Europe and the North Americas.
If miners are centralized, then it helps solve the environmental problem. So, pick your poison: centralization or environment. People who hate bitcoin don't realise that it doesn't really matter how many miners there are - given two weeks.

Bitcoin transactions: These will remain referred to as the on chain transactions. I suspect a different name will be used for the more common transactions. It needs to be something catchy. em-bits? "Sats" is too caucophonous to be catchy. Sits (satoshi-bits)? Pits (part-bits)?  McBits (microbits -- too McDonalds..)?

Other currencies: I doubt another currency will take centre stage for a while. A Musk could start one. You'd have to have that level of prestige to have a shot to be competitive. Even ethereum hasn't been able to successfully decouple from proof of work and solve the transaction computation well. There is an opportunity here for the next stage to solve as fundamental problems beyond currency.

I'm not the most appropriate to expand that, but public key cryptography isn't a one-way function. It can be reversed, it's just currently infeasible. Within the next 5 years, it may not be that hard, but I highly doubt about it. The whole situation involves quantum computers, which I'm completely unfamiliar with. Not sure if it requires a hard fork, the wallets could simply be programmed to not send money to addresses that have already revealed their public key. Otherwise, we could fork it and change to a quantum resistant algorithm.

onchain will become just a wire transfer banking system for large financial businesses

even LN does not work effectively for users to be on a 'hop-spoke' model so they will vault up onchain coins and play with offchain HTLC millisat tokens given to them by hubs setting up their channels
this will be the case to allow accessability to routes and also offchain settlement where the hubs just aggregate offchain channels and redeploy them

im not worried about mining centralisation. my concern is the independant open access to coins onchain

its like how 18th-19th century banks evolved. vault up the gold. let people play with bank note tokens pegged to gold. and slowly make gold transfers less user friendly and make bank notes more user friendly
and we al know what happened to the gold peg after that

next phase is how the difference between stock vs stock options occur
businesses acrue the real stock(coin) and alow options of the stock without giving away the actual stock

many ETF's are doing this lock up btc and offer shares
same will happen on LN
lock up btc and offer millisats but not allow users to broadcast real btc transaction. only allow to have or give up their milisat balance..
in short ETF's LN hubs become bank2.0 where gold(coin) is vaulted and horded by banks. and everyone else is playing with shares and millisat HTLC IOU's
(yes a HTLC is not a bitcoin broadcastable 8decimal tx.. its a 12decimal IOU token)

BTC/BCH is not a "split". BCH is a copy coin like hundreds of other copy coins that copied bitcoin's code and made small changes to it.

Because nothing can replace the on-chain transactions and people will always want to and need to make them.
Also anything built on top of bitcoin's main chain such as second layer depends on the main chain (first layer) for its transactions. Each time someone wants to open a LN channel they need to make an on-chain transaction. So the on-chain capacity has to be able to handle this new use case as bitcoin and LN adoption  grows.

Of course good work has been done to both increase the capacity (SegWit that increased the block size) and reduce the transaction size (upcoming Taproot/Schnorr soft fork) to increase efficiency both contributing to on-chain scaling. But this is still not enough. As Andreas Antonopoulos once said, scaling is not something you solve once. It's a problem we have to always deal with. We improve it a little bit until the future then work on it again and again, advancing with technology advancements and adoption growth.

in the next 5 years, I'm expecting the miner will be fully using Renewable Energy
Since it was one of the problem bitcoin receive recently
bitcoin will also evolve to be adopted mainstream the community will surely solve the problem
I'm also expecting a lower transaction fee in the future in my opinion every halving bitcoin also need a fee correction
I'm also expecting more platform to start to accept bitcoin
5 years might be short but I'm excited about it so I'm willing to wait for this for at least 10 years

5 years is such a short time for a really big advancements in the bitcoin market, there will be advances, don't get me wrong but it will be too small or insignificant for many to witness. The only thing that I expect to happen really is the prices will go really high and we will never be able to touch the current prices because it won't fall really deep.

Saylor and Elons meeting about mining seem to be going forward to regulating miners which eventually the pools will also be cebtralized like only the environment friendly miners can mine or join pools.

what they are doing will prevent anyone who has power source to earn BTC. next 5 years all the solar panel and wind turbines will be sold  with a very high price from china.

I definitely like these prediction for the next 5 years. I had bad trading experiences also my colleagues in terms of transferring coins from one wallet to another due to high fees, so definitely lowering the fees is the number one thing on my crypto wish list. Also easier conversion of your fiat to Bitcoin and vice versa that is the one we always want, easy access to our money. One click on an app will make your Bitcoin into cash for you to use to buy anything you want. Userfriendliness is really what I wanted in crypto and hopefully it will get easier and easier but also more and more secure, in the next 5 years.

If the On-Chain part of the bitcoin technology keeps improving then the usage of bitcoin will be only for the rich, the bitcoin network promises a fair transaction between the richer and the poorer and eventually everyone can access and use, bitcoin adoption in the future will be for the two sides, nothing will stop the On-chain network and therefore lightening network will be more developed perfectly for mass usage, looking at the current situation on LN, few of the crypto enthusiast uses it, few are still having difficulties on how it works and set up procedure, and that's while the implementation is becoming too slow.

I don't feel like Musk can bring anything good to Bitcoin. His involvement will only mean more drama since he's not completely sane.
One day he will praise it the other day he'll say it sucks, pretty much like he just did. Now suddenly he wants to help it, but with first difficulties he could change his mind and again criticize it, because with  his projects he's never at fault. It's always someone else.

I hope that in the next 5 years we'll progress towards faster and cheaper transactions. I don't hope for any so called green mining because we don't need it. The banking system uses much more power than Bitcoin and nobody does anything about it. Bitcoin's carbon footprint is a straw man argument.

exactly. who are they representing, are they the leader of this industry?
the miners somehow are part of the network, let's just say they have a say when it comes to consensus but boi. if you have seen the reaction on twitter, it's a mess, a flame was ignited. it would have been good if they make the meeting live on youtube for everyone to have single reference than everyone piecing together their tweets.

I think the most important thing for Bitcoin in the next five years is to connect with other public chains such as the Ethereum chain through decentralized technology. To be honest, applications such as DEX or various lending products are on the Ethereum chain. BTC on the BTC chain can only be used for value storage and cannot be used for other investments. This is actually what Gavin Wood is trying to accomplish, linking different public chains together, so that BTC has practical applications not only as a store of value.

Considering the current throughput of blockchain, bitcoin transactions won't be seeing any good days in terms of its fees and transaction speed. I mean even if you prioritise your transaction with fees as high as $ 27- $ 37 (latest mycelium fee ) then also it is not guaranteed that it will be confirmed immediately.

It takes around 10-15 minutes for this to happen. I mean if I am paying for premium service then I need premium benefits back.

The operations may get centralised based on the use of electricity and carbon emission ratings. Since billionaires are up raising the issue of mining and its harm to the nature, government may get dragged into the matter real soon.

Harnessing power of social media is getting bold these days. With bitcoin, it's intense and hot topic. Unfortunately I have no speculations regarding pricing because that's just got complex analysis considering anyone can change the price with single tweet.  ;)

Given the billionaire status of Elon Musk, that might have given him a bit of a "God complex" in my opinion - I mean as far as cryptocurrency is concerned. We could not discredit the man much as he did made some revolutionary strides in some industries, but of course I still see him as a businessman. And businessman's goal is to raise profits. That is what he is doing with crypto now, he is trying to use his influence to earn more and more to finance his projects. And the crypto losers are simply helping him fund those projects.

It's hard for me to choose one event, but I'm pretty sure the biggest problem will be high fees and slow transactions. As more people start using Bitcoin, what we currently see only from time to time (usually during the bulling market) with $40 fees can become the new normal unless some solution becomes truly popular (I don't think the Lightning Network can succeed in this because it failed to gather enough users over the years). It might be an off-chain solution, but I think it will be something else because many are against off-chain solutions. Perhaps strict legislation against crypto fraud and zero-confirmation transactions for sums below $50 in physical shops will become popular because it's the simplest solution. Maybe something smarter that we didn't think of yet. The biggest risk of a hard fork will be if someone figures out how to make BTC way more scalable but it requires serious changes.

The only thing I have against zero-conf transactions is if you submit a tx with a sufficiently low fee, it may get kicked out of the mempool before it's added to a block.

I'm not sure that the risk is really comparable to starbucks accepting tap without signature or pin for low cost tx's via credit card, since there's only going to be so many people buying coffee with a stolen card. OTOH, everyone who bought coffee could pay 1 sat per byte, and then during high network congestion, all those low tx fees would be dropped from the mempool. It could result in days of every crypto tx being lost.

but it is certain that 2025 is where there will be an increase again after the fourth halving which falls in 2024. so it must be remembered that every halving occurs, a year later there will be an increase in bitcoin. as happened in the first and second halving where the following year there was an increase, and the ATH that occurred was always at the end of the year.

I agree with your opinion that there will be many events before 2025, what is certain is this year alone which is a year after the third halving which is expected to increase at the end of the year, although now there is a very deep correction, but it will pass. and whether there will be another correction in the next year, like in 2018, of course we can conclude, but we cannot be sure and we will wait for the time.

In principle, before 2025 it could happen beyond what we think and we cannot know but can predict from previous experiences. but there is always a sense of optimism with the development of bitcoin from year to year which will continue to be more advanced, so if it is true that the halving goes according to predictions then 5 know again the price of bitcoin will be higher.