How Will Blockchain Evolve Over The Next 5 Years ?

[igider]

This is one of the key questions .
This is where it is important to remind that blockchain is a foundation technology much more than it is disruptive technology that will give you a quick competitive advantage

Blockchain has today great intrinsic qualities like the ability to create trust among untrusted peers and the ability to secure integrity of transactions, but it has also many limitations and barriers to cross.

Scalability issues due to the consensus algorithms being adopted, cost of transactions as the system grows, or even barriers related to organizations not used to collaborate, or legislation and regulation not being able to cope with disputes, recovering from glitches or bugs. These are all big question and this is why it will take time until blockchain becomes ubiquitous to our economy.

Over the next five years I believe we will see more fragmentation in technology and approaches. We will see quick adoption in closed eco-systems. We will see many pilots and experiments, a lot of startups failing because they not succeed in building eco-systems and a few technology players emerging as the technology matures.

There will be plenty of challenges for Blockchain like adaptability, scalability, acceptance, legislation and regulations. Moreover another technology like quantum will pose threat for its expansion.

If Bitcoin flops in the mid of five years, it'll be setback for Blockchain acceptance. Overall, it'll be experimented in the closed groups. Few collaboration opportunities will arise especially in the banking sector or logistics and transportation .

[BillyBobZorton]

This is one of the key questions .
This is where it is important to remind that blockchain is a foundation technology much more than it is disruptive technology that will give you a quick competitive advantage

Blockchain has today great intrinsic qualities like the ability to create trust among untrusted peers and the ability to secure integrity of transactions, but it has also many limitations and barriers to cross.

Scalability issues due to the consensus algorithms being adopted, cost of transactions as the system grows, or even barriers related to organizations not used to collaborate, or legislation and regulation not being able to cope with disputes, recovering from glitches or bugs. These are all big question and this is why it will take time until blockchain becomes ubiquitous to our economy.

Over the next five years I believe we will see more fragmentation in technology and approaches. We will see quick adoption in closed eco-systems. We will see many pilots and experiments, a lot of startups failing because they not succeed in building eco-systems and a few technology players emerging as the technology matures.

There will be plenty of challenges for Blockchain like adaptability, scalability, acceptance, legislation and regulations. Moreover another technology like quantum will pose threat for its expansion.

If Bitcoin flops in the mid of five years, it'll be setback for Blockchain acceptance. Overall, it'll be experimented in the closed groups. Few collaboration opportunities will arise especially in the banking sector or logistics and transportation .

Blockchains, if not attached to a decentralized token, don't interest me, and I don't see how they can interest anyone in this forum to be honest. Without a cryptocurrency, blockchains become MySQL databases.

Im interested in seeing improvements on the current damocle's sword of Bitcoin: PoW.

Thus far, all other alternatives have fallen short. PoS and so on don't cut it. Ideas like the tangle with IOTA and Byteball with DAG are good ideas but not really a replacement for PoW.

[chiggz]

Right now, blockchain technology is not very useful and practical for most applications. If we focus focus on Bitcoin’s best and worst features we can predict how it will evolve for the further years. Currently the Bitcoin blockchain takes several minutes to confirm a single transaction. Compare this to your transactions on your mobile phone using, say, ApplePay transactions are nearly instantaneous. So any application requiring high volume and quick confirmation times is not a great application to be put on the Bitcoin blockchain for the near future. Whether this will change within 5 years is a guess.

[HeRetiK]

Blockchains, if not attached to a decentralized token, don't interest me, and I don't see how they can interest anyone in this forum to be honest. Without a cryptocurrency, blockchains become MySQL databases.

Well, a distributed database, but a simple database all the same.

The main issue is that without any form of token there's little incentive for the participating parties to stay honest. And if you don't worry about whether the participating parties stay honest, why use a blockchain in the first place?

Im interested in seeing improvements on the current damocle's sword of Bitcoin: PoW.

Thus far, all other alternatives have fallen short. PoS and so on don't cut it. Ideas like the tangle with IOTA and Byteball with DAG are good ideas but not really a replacement for PoW.

Agreed. A viable alternative to PoW would be a game changer, but it doesn't seem like we're quite there yet. IOTA's tangle is basically a DAG, both IOTA and Byetball suffer from the fact that they as of now still require central entities to protect their networks from attacks.

Right now, blockchain technology is not very useful and practical for most applications. If we focus focus on Bitcoin’s best and worst features we can predict how it will evolve for the further years. Currently the Bitcoin blockchain takes several minutes to confirm a single transaction. Compare this to your transactions on your mobile phone using, say, ApplePay transactions are nearly instantaneous. So any application requiring high volume and quick confirmation times is not a great application to be put on the Bitcoin blockchain for the near future. Whether this will change within 5 years is a guess.

Depending on the state of the mempool, instantaneous 0-conf transactions are viable for small transactions even today.

[karmakeddon]

I see a lot of improvement of blockchain technology in it's integration on real world usage in the next 5 to 10 years. The IoT programs we have right now are leaning towards that future, and it is a great start. All we have to do now is to weed out all the ones that will really not be viable and support projects that would impact society in the long run. This is after all, a dream shared by most of the developers nowadays.

[User365]

I think that blockchains will be used very widely in all kinds of fields.

Here are a few examples:

- Industry 4.0: A car which is produced in a factory goes along several steps of manufacturing. There are plans to give each product a unique ID on a blockchain to make every product smart. You can just ask the product, when have you got this part of you and what features do you have (everything on the blockchain)
- Healthcare: Storing your medical data on a blockchain bring several advantages (security, accessibility,...)
- Land register: Imagine your property is stored on a land register blockchain. You can simply sign a smart contract to sell/buy real estate.
- Logistics: Pretty similar to the Industry 4.0 idea but for transportation of goods.

[joeyvdt]

Well there are actually other ways to use the blockchain other than crypto's.
Like a safe place to store a HASH of a file to make sure the file didn't change (whenever there is 1 slightly changed thing, the hash of the file is completely different)

[adityakr56]

This is one of the key questions .
This is where it is important to remind that blockchain is a foundation technology much more than it is disruptive technology that will give you a quick competitive advantage

Blockchain has today great intrinsic qualities like the ability to create trust among untrusted peers and the ability to secure integrity of transactions, but it has also many limitations and barriers to cross.

Scalability issues due to the consensus algorithms being adopted, cost of transactions as the system grows, or even barriers related to organizations not used to collaborate, or legislation and regulation not being able to cope with disputes, recovering from glitches or bugs. These are all big question and this is why it will take time until blockchain becomes ubiquitous to our economy.

Over the next five years I believe we will see more fragmentation in technology and approaches. We will see quick adoption in closed eco-systems. We will see many pilots and experiments, a lot of startups failing because they not succeed in building eco-systems and a few technology players emerging as the technology matures.

There will be plenty of challenges for Blockchain like adaptability, scalability, acceptance, legislation and regulations. Moreover another technology like quantum will pose threat for its expansion.

If Bitcoin flops in the mid of five years, it'll be setback for Blockchain acceptance. Overall, it'll be experimented in the closed groups. Few collaboration opportunities will arise especially in the banking sector or logistics and transportation .

It will be a revolutionary aid in motivating the world towards a better future.
Thw whole world will be run using the blockchain technology surely within next half decade.
Its surely going to happen.

[chacha66]

It will slow down , and then more and more

[ezhui]

Definitely there will be a large number of areas other than financial industry to utilize blockchain technology. Sharing economy like Uber and Airbnb might be one of them that could be disrupted by blockchain tech. Service providers don't have to use the centralized platform to route to end users, they can directly find user in a trustless peer-to-peer network, that is what blockchain good at.

[Kakmakr]

If the Bitcoin Blockchain fails, most other technologies connected to it will also fail. Most Alt coins use the same concept, so they will also fail and some of these private networks are built on top of the same model, so they will also fail. It is very important that the Bitcoin experiment succeeds for all of these other technologies to also thrive.

There will always be better variants than Bitcoin, because that is the nature of this experiment. The main thing is for the original concept to succeed. If it fails, people will lose trust in the technology as a whole. ^hmmmmm^

[HeRetiK]

If the Bitcoin Blockchain fails, most other technologies connected to it will also fail. Most Alt coins use the same concept, so they will also fail and some of these private networks are built on top of the same model, so they will also fail. It is very important that the Bitcoin experiment succeeds for all of these other technologies to also thrive.

There will always be better variants than Bitcoin, because that is the nature of this experiment. The main thing is for the original concept to succeed. If it fails, people will lose trust in the technology as a whole. ^hmmmmm^

Depends on your definition of success. Bitcoin may still succeed, only to get overtaken by a new breed of cryptocurrency / decentralized platform further down the road. I just don't think that any of the alts that we are currently seeing are up to that challenge yet.

Also the whole ecosystem is just now starting to grow up, with Bitcoin still being at the heart of it all. Maybe some time in the future the alt ecosystem will be able to stand on its own feet, but for now Bitcoin is holding everything together.

[benj_pirate]

I wish they would stop forking BTC 4 times a month... This model is more and more like a ponzi where rich get richier and stupid poor buy shit from them because of their ignorance... This is sad and it will lead no where imo. I love Blockchain and I believe in the tech, really, but we should find some way to avoid abusive behavior only here to scam ignorants :/ Some ICOs are in the same bag here. Aren't you scared about this ?

[HeRetiK]

I wish they would stop forking BTC 4 times a month... This model is more and more like a ponzi where rich get richier and stupid poor buy shit from them because of their ignorance... This is sad and it will lead no where imo. I love Blockchain and I believe in the tech, really, but we should find some way to avoid abusive behavior only here to scam ignorants :/ Some ICOs are in the same bag here. Aren't you scared about this ?

Let fools be fools and simply don't buy into it. Every subsequent money grab will be worth less than the one before until the forkings subside and pump'n'dumpers find a new toy to play with.

[Pantoflascrypt017]

Cryptocurrencies is only one way to use blockchain technology there is so much growth and other ways that it can be implemented so the growth will be huge in the next 5 years

[benj_pirate]

I wish they would stop forking BTC 4 times a month... This model is more and more like a ponzi where rich get richier and stupid poor buy shit from them because of their ignorance... This is sad and it will lead no where imo. I love Blockchain and I believe in the tech, really, but we should find some way to avoid abusive behavior only here to scam ignorants :/ Some ICOs are in the same bag here. Aren't you scared about this ?

Let fools be fools and simply don't buy into it. Every subsequent money grab will be worth less than the one before until the forkings subside and pump'n'dumpers find a new toy to play with.

I'm not ok :/
As mass adoption means fools adoption...
If you fuck the fools, you loose mass adoption.
I understand that we are far away from reverting mass adoption because of fews forks and shitty ICOs but I'm saying that the more we fool the fools, the less mass adoption will happen, and mass adoption is what we all want I suppose... :/

[HeRetiK]

Cryptocurrencies is only one way to use blockchain technology there is so much growth and other ways that it can be implemented so the growth will be huge in the next 5 years

I'm still looking forward to see one such non-cryptocurrency blockchain in action, so far most other use cases have only been a mediocre fit.

I'm not ok :/
As mass adoption means fools adoption...
If you fuck the fools, you loose mass adoption.
I understand that we are far away from reverting mass adoption because of fews forks and shitty ICOs but I'm saying that the more we fool the fools, the less mass adoption will happen, and mass adoption is what we all want I suppose... :/

You can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas without heavy regulation -- which would be against pretty much everything that crypto stands for. Actually, you can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas even with heavy regulation. I'm looking at you, Wall Street.

Either way I'd still argue that mass adoption won't necessarily bring more speculators into the game. Most people that we still need to reach just want a safe and easy way to transfer money. Or at least a store of value. Not a speculative investment vehicle. Those people have been onboard for a long time now.

[benj_pirate]

Cryptocurrencies is only one way to use blockchain technology there is so much growth and other ways that it can be implemented so the growth will be huge in the next 5 years

I'm still looking forward to see one such non-cryptocurrency blockchain in action, so far most other use cases have only been a mediocre fit.

I'm not ok :/
As mass adoption means fools adoption...
If you fuck the fools, you loose mass adoption.
I understand that we are far away from reverting mass adoption because of fews forks and shitty ICOs but I'm saying that the more we fool the fools, the less mass adoption will happen, and mass adoption is what we all want I suppose... :/

You can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas without heavy regulation -- which would be against pretty much everything that crypto stands for. Actually, you can't prevent people from investing in bad ideas even with heavy regulation. I'm looking at you, Wall Street.

Either way I'd still argue that mass adoption won't necessarily bring more speculators into the game. Most people that we still need to reach just want a safe and easy way to transfer money. Or at least a store of value. Not a speculative investment vehicle. Those people have been onboard for a long time now.

Agreed. I just think that some fools might invest once in this stupid BITCOIN diamond, get rekted and leave for ever and stick too paypal :/

[saharsh89]

A lot is going to depend on how the ecosystem coexists and grows with the existing financial and regulatory system. While decentralization of processing is looked upon as a way to eliminate the middlemen by the propagators of block-chain, sceptics take it for a system which will help facilitate illegal transactions and fuel anti-social elements. Striking a balance and finding a middle road with regulations which do not limit the system from maximizing its benefits would decide how blockchain is going to thrive. 

[ko2a]

It would seem we are headed into a period of decentralization, privatization and transparency.
Blockchain tech should play an important role in this type of environment.

We havn't seen nothing yet.