What Will Bitcoin Look Like in Twenty Years?

People in and out of crypto see them as a bubble that will pop, causing prices to crash badly. They're right, but it is just the beginning of the story. After the pop, real working ideas will emerge.

Crypto, blockchain and triple entry accounting are probably the most important invention of the last 500 years, so they're not going to go gently into that good night. The bubble burst is just the next step. Three years after that, the tech will really mature and take off running.

Government cryptos will be a very, very bitter pill to swallow for current true believers in the crypto space, but they better get used to them. They will outlaw physical cash, and they will do it under the guise of one of three excuses:

• Stopping money laundering
• Stopping terrorists
• Stopping crime

In a decade or two, expect every strong government cryptocurrencies to come to power and dominate most of the flow of money. Government crypto will represent a complete corruption of the idea of decentralised crypto and apps. But it won't matter. It will happen anyway.

Just because centralized cryptos rise to prominence doesn’t mean the decentralized cryptos will go away. Many governments will try, but they’ll fail to stamp them out. 

The reasons are simple: The same factors that make it hard to form consensus across a blockchain, make it hard for all the world’s governments to agree on anything. If all countries can't agree, then decentralised crypto will stay.

• Blockchain is only the first successful implementation of decentralized consensus mechanisms. There are many others like IOTA's Tangle and HashGraph and many more to follow.
• It's also strongly possible that none of these systems will be designed by humans. Instead, AI's will rapidly iterate on ideas and come up with systems that no individual ever could if they had a hundred years.
• One or two of these systems will dominate all coins and rule them as a meta-system.

Today’s user experience in crypto is awful. Mistype something or copy and paste wrong, and your money disappears forever. If there’s a software glitch or someone hacks my computer or phone, my money is gone forever.

We’ll need algorithmic approximations of the controls we have now for giving money to people we want and keeping it out of the hands of people who want to rob us. We also need the system to protect us from accidents, death and going insane.

All of our economic theories are based on studies conducted with limited data in the analogue age of ink and wood pulp. All current economic theory will prove about as advanced as cave paintings as we experiment with new economic systems.

New coins are micro-economic systems at war. Many will fall by the wayside. 

AI will track statistics in real-time around the globe, and we'll be able to track global production and manufacturing with precision.

People from the World War II generation had one or two jobs their whole life. Today we have five or six. Tomorrow’s people will have five or six at the same time.

Half of those income streams will be automated and passive, likely some kind of crypto UBI. We will also see the rise of AI job matching services. The machines will know your capabilities and skill sets and match short term gigs to you so you don’t even have to look for a job.

Crypto enthusiasts will have to come to terms with the fact that the blockchain can and will enable as much evil as it does good.

Nothing is all good or evil. Everything exists on a continuum. You can kill someone with a gun, but you can also feed your family by hunting. Water sustains life, but it can also drown you or even poison you. Open systems tend toward centralization, and with enough time, central powers can and will corrupt any system to their own ends.

At the moment, we're making coins for everything. But you don't really need a coin.

Coins will start to shake out into various meta categories:

1. Deflationary Saver Coin - for hoarding and investing.
2. Inflationary Spender Coin - mirroring the dollar.
3. Action Token - for actions on the network that should be free, like voting or sending text.
4. Reward Token - a digital representation of karma, incentivizing good behaviour and punishing bad behaviour.

A universal system can be built with these four coins. All other coins will act as a subcomponent.

Bitcoin has a first-mover advantage. It's the first of its kind and dominates the global market share. However, it also suffers from significant flaws that could kill it.

It's the Model T of the blockchain revolution. 

• It has no built-in governance. To change it, a proposal should be submitted where almost everyone agrees, or a new project should be started, and hard fork it.
• What if China turns the Great Firewall on it?
• What if governments simply build a data centre and secretly designed ASICs to run the system?
• What if hostiles just decided to round up all the core developers?