Do you think there will ever be a technology that can replace Bitcoin?

[thecodebear]

Interesting question about the future. Bitcoin is humanity's money for the digital age. It's secure, decentralized, sovereign, global, open and hard money. There's nothing like it in the world and it is so hard to make something like this that after countless attempts the rest of the crypto world simply gave up on trying to be like Bitcoin and gave up on trying to be money and had to go the route of smart contracts/apps/tokens instead.


But, given that the digital age is just beginning, and presumably will last for the rest of humanity, do you think there could ever be a technology, whether in 50 years or 200 years or 5000 years or whatever, that could be better and more powerful money than Bitcoin and potentially replace Bitcoin?

Now I know there's gonna be people who say don't worry Bitcoin is good lol I'm not asking if Bitcoin is in trouble I'm asking how likely do you think it could ever be superceded. Gold lasted as the best money for all of humanity until we moved from metals to paper and to digital. Presumably there isn't something beyond digital technology but given that we are just at the start of the digital age what do you think? Would even a technically superior digital money be able to displace the network effects of Bitcoin? It would likely have to be far superior to Bitcoin to even have a chance, like the motto goes you have to be 10x better to beat the current competition. Would it even be possible for a later digital money technology to be THAT much better than Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself could certainly be better in a few ways, and of course is upgradable. But to make something better from scratch and no network would be something else.


What do you all think? Is Bitcoin the final money solution for humanity or do you think there is some possibility in the near or far distance future that there will be another 'bitcoin-like' moment in history where someone will revolutionize money all over again and create something so much better than Bitcoin that it overcomes Bitcoin's network effects?

[Upgrade00]

Innovation is infinite, meaning there would always be room for improvements in any technology. It is impossible at the time to envision how that change would come, similar to how those in the early days of computers thought that with advancements computers would get progressively bigger not smaller to fit into our pockets.

Bitcoin is a futuristic technology, but the future is going to last a while.

Gold lasted as the best money for all of humanity until we moved from metals to paper and to digital.

The move to paper was barely an upgrade.

[thecodebear]

Innovation is infinite, meaning there would always be room for improvements in any technology. It is impossible at the time to envision how that change would come, similar to how those in the early days of computers thought that with advancements computers would get progressively bigger not smaller to fit into our pockets.

Bitcoin is a futuristic technology, but the future is going to last a while.

Gold lasted as the best money for all of humanity until we moved from metals to paper and to digital.

The move to paper was barely an upgrade.

I mean it was a pretty damn significant upgrade for efficiency. It made it easier to debase the currency for sure, but going away from gold was in general moving from hard currency to weak but the upgrade to paper and then to digital was orders of magnitude greater efficiency for both those upgrades. Much easier to carry around paper bills than a bunch of coins.

Anyway that's not the point of the thread.

As you say, the future is going to last awhile haha, so yeah, the question remains.

[bittraffic]

We can't be sure of what will happen to BTC 200 years later. The halving will probably decrease miners' pay per block down to the smallest they could get but the price could be enormous.

Not sure if BTC will be replaced but sure the altcoins are aiming to be the top choices. Who knows Shib will make us all dog lovers and we are all in the Shibarium and its metaverse buying meta space. My best guess is that every country will have its stablecoin not exactly CBDC but using blockchain and back by commodity.

[mk4]

Assuming that humanity will last more than a million years, it's pretty anti-innovation to think that Bitcoin will be the final form of currency/SoV. There will always be something better; it's just the matter of when. But regardless, if there's anything better, it's definitely not going to be invented in the foreseeable future.

[avikz]

Yes, why not?

During my college days, I never expected to pay the street vegetable vendor from my mobile phone using a QR code, instantly! Now it's a common practice everywhere in my country.

This is one of many examples I can provide which will make you understand that what we can't think today, can happen tomorrow! So obviously there can be such innovations in the future where bitcoin may become completely outdated. Rather, the entire crypto market can become outdated. Innovation knows no boundaries!

[The Cryptovator]

Back 15 years there wasn't Bitcoin. But today it exists and is the most popular cryptocurrency. It's pretty sure there will be something more strong which would be another trend. I am not saying Bitcoin would be replaced but would be more developed. People would start moving there same as people jump into Bitcoin. Technology growing fast right now, so there would be a more technical improvement which would lead discover of more currencies either Decentralized or centralized.

[Pokapoka124]

200 years?? Everyone I know will be long gone by then. No one can predict so far into the future, we can only speculate using analysis of what we have in the present and past. For me, I think over the next decade, there will be a shift in the world of finance, central banks will be going digital. I believe this change will drive more people towards bitcoins and privacy coins because it will be the only way to escape the rabbit hole.

[franky1]

short answer from a bitcoin maximalist

yes there always is a possibility of something people prefer more then bitcoin
which is why devs should concentrate on bitcoin and not their sub-culture of promoting sub networks made just for their sponsors to profit from

a new system can recognise that people wanting to move money without middlemen dont need to be personally paying to 100 recipients in one payment. because real world utility. users only have normally 2 outputs.. 1 to go to the retailer/merchant/service they are trading with. and the other is the remainder of the balance returning to the sender

thus new networks would stick to lean tx size formats to allow more transactions per verification/confirmation period(block)

if fee's go crazy that outprice utility for the masses of "unbanked" third world users
a new blockchain would offer cheaper fees on the blockchain
EG
the current dev politics/sponsored game is to say people should use subnetworks for cheap fee, requiring middlemen routing to service the payments

in short use paypal instead of wire transfer, where they want to raise the price of wire transfer to push people to use paypal
whereby the wire transfer prices push out third world countries from having bank accounts


emphasis:
which is why devs should concentrate on bitcoin and not their sub-culture of promoting sub networks made just for their sponsors to profit from

[Bananington]

But, given that the digital age is just beginning, and presumably will last for the rest of humanity, do you think there could ever be a technology, whether in 50 years or 200 years or 5000 years or whatever, that could be better and more powerful money than Bitcoin and potentially replace Bitcoin?

There will be more advancement in technology in 50years-200years time frame, more than now. And because everything is dynamic, it is possible that there be another kind of technology for payment that is better than bitcoins. The next ten years is difficult to predict, so there is no certainty with any predictions. Rather than thinking far into the future, it is better you focus on the the now and the challenges facing bitcoins currently of which acceptance and adoption is its biggest challenge. We should concentrate on where bitcoin will be in the next 10, 20, 50 years, and not if it will be replaced.

[Dr.Bitcoin_Strange]

IMO, technically speaking, there have been a lot of efforts put into the Bitcoin blockchain before it has lasted till now, and they will continue for a very long time. Innovation will steadily continue to occur, even when most of us are not living in the next 50 or 200 years, but I know Bitcoin will last for a very long time and its value will continue to increase way more than what it is right now.

The world population grows every day as new babies are born, they grow up, and they develop an interest in something, which could be Bitcoin. With that said, new people will continue to dive into Bitcoin and begin to accumulate what they can afford. As this process continues, don't forget that all unmined Bitcoin will finally get mined one day, and by then, people's interest in Bitcoin will still continue to grow, and more people will continue to invest in and accumulate it.

Even if the total supply of Bitcoin is being divided among the world's population, no one might even have up to 0.1 bitcoin. So, from my assumption, in the next 500 years or more, when there are more people and more interest in Bitcoin, there will not even be enough for people to buy it, and its value will increase more than it does today.

From the example of using paper money to replace gold coin, does the availability of paper money devalue the price of gold? or instead gold even became more valuable and more costly than before?

 A short answer: Even if any other technology will supersede Bitcoin, which might be possible or not, it cannot make its value less.

[South Park]

snip

What do you all think? Is Bitcoin the final money solution for humanity or do you think there is some possibility in the near or far distance future that there will be another 'bitcoin-like' moment in history where someone will revolutionize money all over again and create something so much better than Bitcoin that it overcomes Bitcoin's network effects?

If our technological development has showed us something is that it moves on small improvements over already existing solutions until an accumulation happens and finally a breakthrough is achieved, bitcoin is the sum of different technologies which already existed and it created something completely new out of it, since this process took place recently I do not expect another breakthrough to happen soon, however assuming humanity continues its progress and the freedom of thought and enterprise still exist at the time I do not see why another Satoshi could not develop something better on the future.

[Dunamisx]

Many have been so curious about if another technology is already on the way to replace bitcoin and we ain't yet clarified that bitcoin has tendered the use of fiat currency into void, presently we don't have any yet, some may be there somewhere else working and taking research upon how to have better improvements on this or invent an entire something different but none is visible yet, all we have is bitcoin and this will remain for decades even if something nee is likely to come up after bitcoin.

[Kelvinid]

As long as people never find full satisfaction, innovation will come to fill it and it was possible that many years from now another technology would rise.

In fact, many years before we never think about this technology as we are already amazed by ATMs. But it was not the end of cashless developments, someone who really has the passion to do more discoveries will find another option and find Bitcoin and crypto technology. This will have no ending upgrades and we can't even be sure that maybe 5 years from now there is new.

[dunfida]

As long as people never find full satisfaction, innovation will come to fill it and it was possible that many years from now another technology would rise.

In fact, many years before we never think about this technology as we are already amazed by ATMs. But it was not the end of cashless developments, someone who really has the passion to do more discoveries will find another option and find Bitcoin and crypto technology. This will have no ending upgrades and we can't even be sure that maybe 5 years from now there is new.

And it happened already after Bitcoins existence where altcoins had been created considering that those other developers would really be creating something which is really that more that better than with Bitcoin.
So far BTC did able to hold up that a decade+ for being #1 in overall cap which it isnt really that shocking considering on being the origin of cryptocurrencies and the rest was really just that
that trying out to replace it on top.

Speaking about being replaced then there's no assurance about being on the top forever.Its true that innovation doesnt really stop on progressing on which means that
there would be something better.It is really just a matter on how the demand would really make up some sudden u-turn.

[GreatArkansas]

But, given that the digital age is just beginning, and presumably will last for the rest of humanity, do you think there could ever be a technology, whether in 50 years or 200 years or 5000 years or whatever, that could be better and more powerful money than Bitcoin and potentially replace Bitcoin?
(....)

We'll never know here because as you can see since Bitcoin started, more than 10 years already, and a lot of projects that attempted to replace Bitcoin or create another cryptocurrency that tries to replace Bitcoin all failed.
So for me, it is likely impossible for some project or technology will replace Bitcoin. Maybe there could be some "alternative" for Bitcoin in the future.
Just think of Gold, gold is still here today, gold has value and you can do gold as a store of value and many other things.

[d5000]

"A technology"? For sure. For example, we can think about futuristic economic systems which don't need money at all because resource usage can be monitored in realtime, or which use not a single general-purpose currency but several sub-currencies, e.g. one for natural resource usage, one for knowledge-based work, and so on.

If the question was "a currency", my opinion is that it largely depends how Bitcoin itself develops over time. If we speak about timeframes of hundreds or thousands of years, there will be probably events which would require a significant update of the protocol.

Take the fears about quantum computers. It's possible that Bitcoin will have to change the public key algorithm, eventually even the hashing algorithm to get rid of some threats related to this technology. And it's possible that this requires a hard fork, although I'm not completely sure. In this case, the community will largely be responsible to decide if the update is applied or not - and if it behaves in a too conservative way, it's possible that a competitor can take over.

I'm however optimistic that Bitcoin solves the "currency" aspect in a pretty timeless way (for decades or centuries to come), and at the same time the system is flexible enough to be able to adapt to these future challenges.

[romero121]

Technology can't be stopped, it goes on and on. Just think of the monetary system, From the bar tender method we've reached the level of using cryptocurrency. This is something out of technology, even with the card transaction people were much confused and people weren't using it much. Now things have gone even high in technology and people are much used to the wallet transactions. So, with time the change happens and people gets used to it.

In terms of replacement I don't think anything could do it. Just because bitcoin existed fiat hadn't got away from usage. Same as that just because something is innovated bitcoin won't get away from its usage and purpose of innovation.

[tiCeR]

I think the more interesting question is how the replacement will happen? Transitioning from gold to paper money doesn't destroy gold's value. I am convinced that one day there will be a technology that is going to replace Bitcoin in some way. As has been mentioned before essentially everything comes to an end at some point. The thing is will it be something that first cracks Bitcoin's algorithm and destroys a lot of wealth? Or will there be some sort of smooth transition where wealth stored in Bitcoin is still not rendered worthless and everyone has a fair chance to shift from Bitcoin into whatever that next thing could be? When technology is involved the way it is in Bitcoin, it could all come to an end with a big boom I guess. Any thoughts on that?

[kamvreto]

I think the more interesting question is how the replacement will happen? Transitioning from gold to paper money doesn't destroy gold's value. I am convinced that one day there will be a technology that is going to replace Bitcoin in some way. As has been mentioned before essentially everything comes to an end at some point. The thing is will it be something that first cracks Bitcoin's algorithm and destroys a lot of wealth? Or will there be some sort of smooth transition where wealth stored in Bitcoin is still not rendered worthless and everyone has a fair chance to shift from Bitcoin into whatever that next thing could be? When technology is involved the way it is in Bitcoin, it could all come to an end with a big boom I guess. Any thoughts on that?

this may take decades to be able to make the transition, because there will always be new innovations due to increasingly sophisticated technological developments. Bitcoin may be an example of another technological development. Today bitcoin is a highly valuable and decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin is currently still in the early stages of development, Bitcoin is also not fully mined. When Bitcoin is fully mined and supplies are limited, the development of bitcoin will move on to an advanced stage. Hoping that some new technology will make the transition better, Bitcoin is still a popular digital asset and still reigns supreme in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.