Bitcoin Forum

What innovative methods or technologies do you foresee emerging within the Bitcoin ecosystem over the next decade to enhance both its scalability and environmental sustainability, while maintaining its core principles of decentralization and security?

I truly appreciate your feedback!

In the coming decade, we're likely to see some cool new tricks and tech pop up in the Bitcoin world to make it faster, greener and more efficient all while keeping it decentralized and secure. Theres a talk of exploring different consensus mechanisms, like proof-of-stake, to cut down on energy use. And let's not forget about other tech like sharding and sidechains which could also help with scalability while being eco-friendly. It's an exciting time for Bitcoin and there's no shortage of smart minds working on ways to make it better for everyone

Over the next decade, Bitcoin aims to handle more transactions efficiently and reduce its environmental impact, keeping its commitment to decentralization and security.
There will be the help of layer-2 solutions and adopting greener mining technologies.
These steps are expected to make Bitcoin, more sustainable, and securely future-proof. Just my 2 cents.

Not sure about it though, there are L2 solutions already in place. And as much as we like to see changes in Bitcoin, core developers will have to come up with consensus and it's not going to be easy.

For environmental sustainability, it's not Bitcoin per se, but those who produces mining hardware and what renewable sources this miners are going to used as this is one attacks that anti-Bitcoin is when they try to picture it as the one hurting the environment as it consumes a lot of energy for mining.

bitcoin mining devices do not see nor care whats inside a block.. an asic just hashes a hash..
a block can be empty or hold thousands of transactions, and neither end affects the mining chore/work/function

so transaction scaling is not going to cause environmental disaster

as for the separate issue of speaking about only the mining function done by asics
well compared to hashes per second of CPU, asics have already made advances in innovated methods to achieve more hashes for less power per hash

as for speaking about renewable sources of energy. this is not a issue of bitcoins cause, but an issue of a countries own power companies that need to change their own business models per power company/power plant. infact its electric vehicles making energy demands at random times of day in bursts of 70kwh in 20minutes that will cause more power impacts, compared to bitcoins predictable power utilisation

bitcoin miners have a predictable rate of usage
EG 24/7 3.5kwh at x asics per location.. which can be calculated and predicted for the 2 year lifespan of those asics
and so asic farms can have payment contracts drawn to buy power in allotments to cover that 2 year period

ev cars however use 70kw+ per full battery but charge at random times of day/week in short sharp surges. unpredictably

last thing to note. there are less asics on the planet than there are EV cars. so it will be the car industry that will impact power demand, power surge and brown out risk possibilities, so they need to get involved more in the innovation of power supply companies

I'm not up to date with the stuff that's going to be invented or created with the help or the inspiration of bitcoin or bitcoin related tech but I do know for sure that we're going to see more people trying to create their own cryptocurrency that want to deviate from how bitcoin moves in the market because most of the time, altcoins are following the market movement of bitcoin and so it becomes predictable. Another thing that could happen would be more people trying to make technology that involves bitcoin or anything like that, probably a better mining rig that can outperform the current one that most miners got, hell we might even see a rig that you can plug to your computer and mine bitcoins for you.

as for bitcoin innovations for bitcoiners benefit
bitcoins never leave the bitcoin network,, FACT
so silly idea's that innovating bitcoin involves tricks to get people to abandon using the bitcoin network as being innovative, are laughable
subnetworks that dont use blockchains are old tech, old idea's not new (the cypherpunks were playing with those old idea's even before bitcoins invention)

bitcoin network needs to scale. and by this i do not mean the idiot echo chamber narrative of bitcoin being a dystopian one world currency needing to cover ~300k tx a second for the entire worlds currency usage of all currencies in one

the reality is much more scalable..
things like code(which bitcoin is) that:

* formulates ways to punish only the bloating spam creators. to cause them to not be using as much space per block, to then allow more genuine transactions to confirm sooner by being added into the space that spammers/bloaters took up

*creates transactions that are leaner than the current average of 1kb (4k tx/4mb block=1kb per tx average). transactions that can be less than a quarter of current averages can multiply the amount per block allowed

*re-utilising the 4mb space as true 4mb for the main tx data, without the metadata junk of the 1mb base:3mb cludgy miscount segregation
this also can increase the transaction count

*and then the blocksize increase, does not need to leap to obsurd amounts narrated by idiots. but instead progressively grow, this can be done without dev politics need of involvement deciding how much and when, but instead using code to read blockdata and at certain milestones all nodes react and change the amounts allowed...  (much like hashrate difficulty does not need dev political input per fortnight, the nodes work it out themselves via blockdata)

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the current lineup of subnetworks fail many tests of security, autonomy, meeting their objectives,
there will be future subnetworks yet to be made from scratch that will fill niche needs of temporary services.. but without the presumption that everyone should abandon using bitcoin and be locked into those niche subnetworks for long periods

First, thanks for the question, and it's very interesting of course. I think the scalability, security, core principles of decentralization and environmental issues in the Bitcoin ecosystem and those four aspects are also things that we should know together both the progress and development of this innovative technology and I think the benefits are not only for the Bitcoiner community but the direction is towards sustainable adoption.

Yes.  The four aspects that you conveyed are also basic foundations in the ecosystem and  if see BTC price up generally sound  the problem is always in high fees due to the increasing number of users and transactions and of course and this is also considered quite troublesome also for users. Well, for other advanced aspects I think the efforts that have been seen now are like there are Layer 2 Solutions such as Lightning Network,  There are continuing efforts to optimize Block Size and Transaction Throughput as well as Sustainable Mining Practices. But from what I've written, it's most likely just a general, but at least that's what I've known and been following for this time.

The issue with transaction charges, maybe later it implementation of the increase on block size will not be a threat anymore to bitcoin users from having an increasing transaction fee rate, people want to experience the lowest and possible least rate for making bitcoin transactions and this will be their utmost desire in using this decentralized currency when they found out that its the least or one of the least that has lower cost of making transactions in cryptocurrency.

Lots of projects are already now experimenting with AI technology
to enhance more of their capabilities in analyzing data. I think we could see
some pretty accurate and specific assumptions in the next couple of years
which is something that would be definitely prove helpful to us investors

Hopefully we would finally solve the problem of transaction fees and congested mempool. I think that if tech were developed to reduce transaction fees, we could truly use bitcoin as a method of payment and adaptation will be way underway.

Another thing would be figuring out how to minimize the energy being used by bitcoin. I personally do not think bitcoin is responsible for most of carbon emissions however it would still be helpful to the environment to mitigate the impact of climate change as much as we can.

I think over the course of a few years, BTC ecosystem may get used to renewable sources of energy to power mining farms and machines.
Also is the advancement of AI technology which is already in use but it should be more refined for use within a strategy of investment not just for traders only.
Furthermore, virtual reality is one technology that is yet to link up fully with the decentralized system but we may be seeing how such tech might get infused to help traders enter a virtual environment and earn cryptocurrency as well as invest or trade within.

Proof of stake (POS), layer2, sidechain...? How can you call these technologies that will make bitcoin faster and better while still being decentralized and secure? I sincerely ask, do you know what the concept of POS is?

In terms of innovation to make bitcoin better, we don't have too many solutions so far. Besides applying LN to reduce transaction fees, expanding the blockchain or reducing energy use, we still don't have any technology that can solve it. We are all waiting and hoping that the developers will find some solution soon.

Lightning Network is Layer 2, so if you think POS, Layer 2 and Sidechain aren't decentralized and secure, you're actually saying Lightning Network isn't secure too.

But yeah I agree POS is sucks, it's actually a protocol that will kill Bitcoin's purpose, Bitcoin will never ever adopt POS. I don't think the developers will find a solution to combat against high fees because with the high adoption and we want a secure network, high fees is inevitable.

lightning is just a shoddy sandbox experiment that doesnt meet promises and has many flaws and bugs
other subnetworks will be made later(from scratch) learning from LN mistakes. offering niche services
BUT
bitcoin network is the bitcoin network, bitcoin stays on the bitcoin network.. thinking everyone should lock up their btc and then abandon bitcoin utility pretending these subnetworks "improve bitcoin" is like saying lock up your gold.. use bank promissory notes/credit cards to avoid using debit cards/assets.. under the guise of 'to improve the debit card system'..(but doesnt improve it)
 
.. in actual fact is LN's function is to lock your real assets up and then use debt/credit(unsettled iou's as debt/credit depending on which side of the channel value you sit on) on another system and abandon using a real assets movements, to play with iou units on another system and settle up when your balance is zero and need to hand over(close channel to utxo confirm transfer of) real assets to then lock up a new set of assets to then play with iou balance debt/credit again, until you settle up again

yes there will be niches for these debt/credit facilities of swapping unsettled debt.. and borrowing partners/routers credit balance.. but lets not just push for bitcoin to become a worse offering compared to fiat..

Two things I would like to see in Bitcoin in the coming days. Not in decades but in the coming days.

1. The block size increase so that Bitcoin network can handle more transactions at lower cost without going through lightning network.
2. Complete blanket ban on ordinals. This madness needs to stop asap.

These are not really innovations, but I must do in order for Bitcoin to become more reliable, scalable and cheaper.

there are ways to disable the opened opcodes that allow unchecked junk to pass into blocks

there are ways to open up the 1mb base:3mb segregation to be a unified 4mb space for real tx data
which those two things alone will allow more transactions to utilise the 4mb space that devs dont have issues with the network filling per block
and even the tx formats where signatures/sigscripts are at end of a tx can still function (so no fear fud that it breaks "segwit" "taproot" transaction functions)

there are ways to make transactions even more leaner than the current 1kb average tx (4k tx in 4mb space=1kb per tx)

and there are ways(if cultish groups stop their REKT campaigns of other brands operating on the network offering proposals) can offer other brands with proposals of these things and also options of blocksize increases without needing to wait and be patient for core dev political human trust/decisions

One distinctive innovation I will love to see in the near future is nothing but a permanent solution to "Bitcoin scalability" which has always been a major issue of concern to all Bitcoin enthusiast, due to it's limited capacity to handle large transaction within a short period of time. While, the second problem which I wish to see an innovative solution to it in the near future is an improvement on "Bitcoin Mempool Congestion", which has always causes high transaction fee whenever the Mempool is congested. Caused when transactions submitted exceeds the processing capacity of the Bitcoin network.

At the moment, L2 networks of BTC are in great hype, there are bundles of new projects in the market that allow staking, and other types of implementations even Dapps too, for example, galileo, particle network, satoshiVM, etc, these types of projects are broadening the vision of people that they have set for the BTC. Like who would have thought we can do staking in BTC and can use BTC for dapps. And who knows what is coming next?

Besides this, there are other updates on the network level, like the V27 update where they will try to eliminate the inscription feature or error (whatever you consider it). That's what I knew, I hope to know more in this thread, BTW its a good one.

The first thing that I believe will emerge within Bitcoin ecosystem within next decade is the wide acceptance of this crypto-currency in many countries. The ETFs will play their role in helping Bitcoin to reach that goal.

From environmental point of view, I don't think we may see much changes, but if most of the mining farms shift to solar energy then that would be a good progress but still it won't be of much help because overtime we will have more powers ASIC miners that may consume more energy.

POS will never be a good option for Bitcoin. Having it with a limited supply is already enough for its value and as for it becoming a POS then it's just going to give more vulnerability as it's will lessen the security of it so, more flaws to come.

Exactly.

Every time that there will be a proposal and after its implementation, another problem will occur and this is like an attached problem that we'll never see go because of the high demand.

To be honest with you, I can't answer this question, and have never actually given this a thought, aside from the general perception that, in the future, bitcoin may likely have grown and established itself to an extent that it will be generally accepted globally as legal means of paying for goods and services, sending values accross and around the world, become a legal tender in several countries, and many other countries, if not all, dumping the US dollars and using bitcoin as their reserve currency.

Those are what I think and I believe many think same too, but unfortunately for many of this, it will or might take alot of time before bitcoin accomplishes all this and many of us present here today, if not all; may not be alive to witness when all this will happen, but right now though, we can always be happy and proud that Bitcoin was invented in our time and we are among the very first set of people to adopt bitcoin in this generation, it's a story alot of future generations will hear or read and marvel.

So, in the nutshell, I don't see much, aside bitcoin becoming much more stronger, price becoming higher and it gaining more stability, as well as acceptance in the future, which possibly will give birth to an entirely and completely new kind of payment system, something we have not actually seen now.

You are crazy if you believe that bitcoin will transition to a proof-of-stake mechanism. Proof-of-stake would undermine a lot of the fundamentals that bitcoin was built upon. PoW is often seen as more secure than PoS due to its reliance on computational power. In PoW, miners compete to solve complex mathematical puzzles to validate transactions and add blocks to the blockchain. This requires significant computational resources, making it expensive for malicious actors to attack the network.

PoW is also considered to be more decentralized compared to PoS. In PoW, anyone with the necessary hardware can participate in the mining process, whereas PoS typically requires participants to hold a certain amount of the cryptocurrency, potentially leading to centralization among those with the most coins.

Some years back,a question like this came up,What is the purpose of bitcoin? And now this...
Bitcoin was created as a way for people to send money over the internet. The digital currency was intended to provide an alternative payment system that would operate free of central control.
 
To be honest,I can't really think of anything right now.Does bitcoin have another purposes or intentions to promote and boost the technological sector other than been a digital currency that aims to eliminate the need for central authorities such as banks or governments.

bitcoin is a currency network.. and should stick to that
however, more broadly.. the blockchain technology can be used for multiple types of data that dont need to be currency based

just think about any IT service that require multiple access points but has one central server holding the data.. then imagine that data server is distributed on multiple continents so that no single IT manager/power outage or facility disruption can take down the data/edit the data.

things like international identity records for border control. instead of relying on one government ID records department, imagine an international ID network that all continents have access to so that the TSA at airports can share information on passports

things like births deaths and marriage certificates can be proven without relying on one country needing to speak to an embassy of another country

heck imagine a game avatar that you can take from one game and apply it to another game. taking your gamer stats with you because multiple games access the gamer network of ID/stats

even in private blockchains of a company. just not having one server but a server per car dealership, bank branch, amazon fulfilment allows data integrity of stocks/assets/product audits where one employee cant mess with the data and power outage at one location doesnt disrupt the network

blockchains purpose is  distributed ledgers of proof of data
by this i mean the most critical parts are not the raw data of a transaction, paragraph, record.. but the locked in merkle tree of leafs of hashes that identify and prove linkage to the raw data, and then the linkage of the chains of blocks time stamp that data based on which came first

so not al blockchains need to also supply all raw data of every record. they can have distributed nodes of just the blocks and the merkle leaf identifiers of data (without publicising the data itself)
thus just proving the individual locations that do have their own raw dataset can prove their data was registered at certain dates without having to tell everyone of the raw data itself, and only need to prove it to those directly involved in the raw data need

Yes, I think LN is insecure and that's why it's not popular until now even though it's been deployed for quite a while.

I agree with you, everything has pros and cons, and we cannot ask bitcoin to be so perfect that it doesn't have any disadvantages. If we want decentralization and maximum privacy, we need to make trade-offs, and high fees are the price we have to pay when using bitcoin. That's completely appropriate and nothing excessive. If someone wants cheap, fast and can accept less security then POS is an option.

Bitcoin's new development will be achieved with innovative technology. Bitcoin is growing in popularity due to its decentralization many companies are incorporating bitcoin into their operations for which bitcoin transactions are becoming faster. With both environmental sustainability and climate change bitcoin is a good way and has made an incredible difference in people's lives. Bitcoin's new strategy has been greatly accelerated by the development of technology.

First, expect layer-2 technologies like the Lightning Network to boost transaction throughput. Off-chain scaling will alleviate the main blockchain, enabling fast, cheap transactions. Second, expect consensus processes to improve, possibly toward energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake models. This would greatly reduce environmental problems. Zero-knowledge proof advances could improve privacy and increase verification efficiency.

These modifications will require new, well-crafted BIPs. Bitcoin's open-source nature fuels a global developer community. This collaborative atmosphere and rigorous development method will lead to robust, reliable, and transformational solutions. The next decade will be historic for Bitcoin.

bitcoin does not require high fee's
its infact high fee's that pushes people away from using bitcoin and using other networks instead, thus abandoning btcoin..  that makes there be less bitcoin utility and less users securing the network because they dont use the bitcoin network often enough to want or need to sync their node... they end up using insecure lite-wallets on other networks and let hubs/central services maintain the off network value, so it doesnt help with decentralisation of bitcoin

if people want to cry about
paying $50 for a hard drive to store 2 decades of transactions is costly
but ok with
$50 for a single transaction on the bitcoin network.. or paying $50*2 to lock in and unlock on the bitcoin network every few months/year to then play debt/credit IOU unsettled balance games on another network,

they have their math backwards