my prediction btc will not be used as a currency, it will be used as the greatest store of value avialible . it will be value so high the little bit of transaction fees is enough to feed the miners to keep it running. the global govt will have no problem with btc sitting in the sidelines like gold . as for the alt coins, they will all be overpowered by the govt fiatcoin they will come up with. the best chance for any crypto is to work on the store of value aspect, u cant complete with the global govt, too many sheeps backing it.
I can see this picture, but I honestly fail to see the use. It is as if one is asking the question "what can we do for crypto", and not "what can crypto do for us ?". Crypto is a tool to obtain something, and my point is and remains that its only use is to obtain freedom that has been taken away. Crypto is NOT practical, crypto is not environment friendly or computing friendly. To go through all that hassle, you must obtain something that you couldn't get otherwise, and all the hassle of crypto comes from the implementation of trustlessness, which is of course a concept related to freedom. Without freedom, trustlessness doesn't mean anything, because you are forced to trust the one that takes your freedom away, the centralized authority. And if you have true freedom, you cannot be supposed to trust a privileged elite, so the system has to be egalitarian (in rights - no "masternodes") and hence cannot be trusted otherwise than by cryptographic proof.
So in either case, whether you are WILLING to give up your freedom for that centralized authority, or because you've GIVEN UP and consider that it is simply too strong, and you are AFRAID of it, all the hassle of crypto is useless.
This is why a "regulated crypto" (like bitcoin is becoming) is an oxymoron. If it is regulated, there are much much simpler ways to do the same thing.
So the question now is: do we NEED a digital gold that is not a currency ? What can we do with it that we can't do with gold ? The biggest problem with a store of value on the long term is that states want to take it away. When you see how states are chasing people that have "hidden bank accounts", you see what I mean. In as much as bitcoin would obtain an extremely high market cap, for sure the chain will be analysed, will be taxed, and most of bitcoin will end up in a digital Fort Knox. So if you're trying to hide long term digital gold from the states, on the transparent bitcoin chain, that's a risky thing to do. And if you are playing it according to the rules, why would you use bitcoin in the first place ?
There are very many reasons not to trust bitcoin as a store of value in the long term. I would say that the main reason is that sooner or later, bitcoin will start to fork. In fact, I'm amazed it hasn't forked yet. Ethereum showed the way. If I were to make an altcoin, honestly, I wouldn't start a new chain with a genesis block, but I would fork off bitcoin.
Each time you fork a coin, you split (unevenly of course) the market cap.
Another reason is that such a purely speculative asset is highly volatile. Gold is a different beast, because it has 5000 years of history as a value keeper. But apart from gold, an asset that has no "stickiness of prices" and is pure speculative belief, is highly volatile.
So again, I don't see the use case of crypto, like bitcoin, if it is "storage of digital gold" on a transparent block chain in agreement with the laws of the day. I think that holding gold (paper or physical), or holding a diversified set of shares, is the classical, and still much better way which will be preferred by the vast majority of law-abiding and less law-abiding wealthy people.
The real use of crypto is as a currency, to do those economic interactions that are hampered by law and state in one way or another. In other words, as a short-term store of value between two trades. There, and in my opinion ONLY there, crypto has its place. The hassle is worth it, because it is simply not possible to do without, because the laws are forbidding you, stealing you, or making life impossible to do so, and hence it is impossible or highly risky to use classical means of payment which leak information to the state. But crypto is a pain to use, compared to VISA. So it has to be worth it and has to offer sufficient protection against being traced.
I don't see any other use of crypto, honestly. If it is not to free trade, and if it is to do, with more troubles, what you can already do, I fail to see the point of it.
It is very easy to set up a state crypto, that undoes everything that crypto stands for. You can, like ZCASH, have a trusted setup, where the state has the golden key. You can also have a state golden "mining" key: instead of PoW or PoS, you have PoK : proof of key, to mint blocks. So only the state can mint blocks cryptographically. You can have a fee system that is nothing else but a kind of VAT: a percentage of every transaction goes to the state. The state can make as much money as it desires. The state could have a view key that can reveal the full transaction history, which is hidden for all others. It would be true crypto, and I would totally fail to see its point: it is even worse than the banking system concerning Big Brother stuff. So I fail to see the joy that would come with this "adoption of crypto".
