Today, the genesis block, also known as the first bitcoin, was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto 14 years ago. Millions of blocks have been mined into the blockchain by bitcoin miners since the currency's creation. It was created as a substitute for centralized fiat money, which bitcoin is decentralized.

History indicates that the first block was mined almost instantly because it had a difficulty of 1. Unlike the vast majority of Bitcoin blocks today, the genesis block was almost certainly mined by a computer using its central processing unit (CPU).

As of June 2022, there were roughly 19.07 million Bitcoins in use. Accordingly, only 1.92 million Bitcoins are available for mining, and more than 90% of all Bitcoins are already in circulation. According to experts, the last bitcoins will be mined by 2140.

We still have a long way to go before we can completely mine the entire bitcoin blockchain. Despite the controversy, bitcoin is still prevailing and gaining global awareness, with the hope of being accepted globally in the coming years.

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https://www.blockchain-council.org/cryptocurrency/how-many-bitcoins-are-left/

https://learn.bybit.com/crypto/21-million-bitcoin-limit-mined/

I've been wondering recently what's ahead for us in terms of the evolution of digital currencies.

There has been a lot of amazing development with blockchain and cryptocurrencies in general in the past decade. But I wonder if there's anyone working on other ideas or technologies that could also be promising. I'm not talking about altcoins. I mean real breakthrough ideas, similar to what happened when Bitcoin was originally introduced. It would be really exciting to witness the birth of something completely new in the next years/decades. I'm sure we have other brilliant "Satoshis" out there.

I'd love to learn more about cool projects and concepts that could be the evolution of blockchain (again, not altcoins please  )

But unfortunately, that will never happen. Dreaming of bitcoin being mass-accepted by governments as a world currency is indeed an impossible task. Currently, only 2 countries accept bitcoin as legal tender and both are struggling due to weak economies and mounting debt. They're betting their economy on bitcoin because they don't have a better solution either. But for countries with strong economies, there is no reason to get rid of their own currency and adopt a decentralized currency. Especially the US, whose USD is considered the world's standard currency, will never let this happen.

Let's admit that double digit inflation is here to stay. Most of the governments around the world are resorting to handing out freebies in exchange of votes, and the era of fiscal conservative policies is over. Here in India, there is a competition between different political parties to hand out the maximum number of freebies. But the problem is that tax revenue is constant and not growing. The only solution here is to print additional amounts of money, and this is resulting in higher inflation rates. And given the rate of printing money, I would expect the inflation rates to go up considerably in the next 4-5 years.

Now Australia is starting to follow El Salvador's lead by placing 216 crypto ATM in its territory and this has made Australia overtake El Salvador to become the 4th largest crypto ATM center. El Salvador's position as the fourth largest crypto ATM center was short-lived as Australia upped its game over the following months.

And what's unique is that not only Australia is doing this, but there is also Spain which has installed 215 crypto ATM and made Spain the third largest crypto ATM center. This means that crypto ATM have now begun to spread in several developed countries and this indicates that developed countries are starting to accept crypto as a legal payment. And one more thing that is really interesting is Nigeria's efforts to enforce adoption of internal central bank digital currency (CBDC) - eNaira - forced the government to limit ATM cash withdrawals to $225 (100,000 naira) a week. _{Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/australia-overtakes-el-salvador-to-become-4th-largest-crypto-atm-hub}

Money isn't free and if there is any either its a scam or complete value less project so don't waste time on researching about how to make free money and how to get free cryptocurrency. Just use your common sense and earn the money for that the ways are limit less, you can use your skill to make them in legit way or anything apart from to make huge tons.

Yes, basically many people are sceptical of Elon Musk's actions and there are also so many who respect Elon Musk because the several times he tweeted about Cryptocurrency it has always been a topic of conversation among retail or institutional investors, I also did not escape that when it was time for Elon to buy Bitcoin or as its father Dogecoin, and it has an impact on the market, so back to each perspective, in my opinion.

Indeed, so far I have not seen Elon Musk preaching or alluding to crypto in his tweeter account, maybe what you are saying is true, he has lost his interest in crypto.

I doubt that US is going to let this war end anytime soon. The plan was always to recreate what happened to NATO over the past 20 years for Russia in Ukraine. All sides are predicting a very dire 2023 because of this specially since we haven't seen any signs of deescalation from neither US nor Russia.

PoS fails in its eventual need to custodianise to syndicate(combine value) the stake to meet the thresholds. making places like coinbase a central point of failure of PoS (as we are seeing with ethereum that is highly staked and custodianised in coinbase

The time to mine a new block is on average 10 minutes, independent of the number or speed of the miners, the difficulty gets updated roughly every 2 weeks to keep the time between two blocks roughly at 10 minutes.

So there's no such thing as the network becoming too slow.

Also, there's lightning which runs on top of Bitcoin and makes transactions almost immediate.

Russia's war in Ukraine will go on for about another six months, according to the most optimistic forecasts, and should end in Russia's defeat. It is already quite clear that Russia cannot win the war it started. But it can still drag on and this will really lead to a further aggravation of the economic situation in the world. In order for it to end quickly, it is necessary for the states to unite and force Russia to stop its aggression.
As for inflation, it is an important companion of the economy of states and plays both a negative and a positive role.

It is definitely near the impossible level, but it did get close for a while and that is the weirdest period. I mean think about it, we are talking about a situation where it was nearly impossible levels and then this happened, how could we move away from it at all?

I believe the huge hype we had along with Elon promoting it to nearly hundred million people, it all caused the price to go up more than it probably should. I understand increases but this was just way too much and that's a bit of a problem. This caused tons of people to lose a lot of money as well, look at the price right now, it's nowhere near the level where it should be and that's an issue.

Out of the 116 fiat currencies tracked by Fiat Market Cap, Bitcoin already has a larger market cap than most of them.

At today's price, Bitcoin is sitting at 28/116 which puts it in the top 25% of all currencies. https://fiatmarketcap.com/

Bitcoin in might not be "The World Currency" today but it is already larger than most of them (by market cap) and used in more countries than most of them.

Let's see what happens over the next decade.

I bet you that your predictions would turn out wrong. Paper money has been in existence and use for over a century(that’s a 100 years). We have gotten familiar and used to the paper money that any other means of payment would be scrutinized thoroughly and initially would be distrusted by most people.

Paper money will almost definitely still be in existence and use in 10 years. Besides, what other means of payment is as widespread, known and accepted as the fiat system? None that I know of.
In 10 years from today, we would still be using the fiat system. There may be other new and innovative means of making and receiving payments, that doesn’t mean the fiat system would be completely abolished.

El Salvador has legalized Bitcoin in its country through legal tender. He was the first to legalize Bitcoin in his country and simultaneously set up several Bitcoin ATM. Statistics from the country's finance department show that they currently have 2,300 bitcoins in their coffers. The government of the country is very much in danger due to the extreme fall in the price of Bitcoin. Here if Bitcoin goes from 200k to 500k dollars but El Salvador will not be able to become the first richest country in the world. El Salvador will never come to the top of the world leaving behind many developed countries. This is completely ridiculous.

I feel like the general public's view regarding cryptos has always been more negative than positive: many people simply don't understand how they work, many other people missed the bus, or at least they think they did, so they just hope everything is gonna sink because they're jealous. Without even mentioning all the bs coming from the governments...

The thing is, the first ever problem with centralized exchanges were mt.gox, something that had nothing to do with crypto at its starting concept, that became a huge bitcoin exchange and got "hacked", don't know if that's true or not but that's the issue.

I personally need to explain to people that we moved on from mt.gox and still kept using it, dozens more crashed and got hacked and so forth, maybe over a million bitcoins (which is huge in a 21 million max supply currency) was lost from users, and yet we are still using it. Why? Well my simple understanding is that even if the money is gone from one user, it is at another user, and if not, then it's gone and leftover bitcoins are more valuable.

Are there still really decentralized networks in DeFi? In my opinion, this is already more fiction than truth. In most protocols, the main supply of tokens is owned by a few addresses who can control the protocol, or manipulate the prices. Anything PoS is no longer decentralized. In addition, PoS is very prone to all kinds of attacks and exploits, which happen almost every day.

It is the governments that work against the adoption of bitcoin. There are countries taking adequate measures in favour of bitcoin mass adoption. Last year the countries to top the list favouring bitcoin mass adoption were Brazil, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, El Salvador and Central African Republic. These countries amidst all the opposition and different problems have been working on developing framework to support bitcoin usage. Governments fearing cryptocurrency is the only problem.