Many people are often asking about the future of bitcoin. They say: ok bitcoin is a good start but there are many other cryptocurrencies which are more efficient, faster, etc. Bitcoin is obsolete. But is this really true?
Frankly no. Why? Because it is not possible to have something similar to bitcoin, no cryptocurrency is same as bitcoin or even better. But this is not a sentence from a bitcoin maximalist, rather is something due to important objective considerations. Bitcoin was created as decentralized censorship-resistant and permissions-less money and as storage of value. Bitcoin was born from nothing, as a “virgin birth“. This means that it was created when no one was thinking about it, no one had any expectations about a digital currency, nobody paid for it, no one sponsored for it. The bottom line is something really unprecedented, and this cannot be replicated today by any other project.
Moreover bitcoin cannot be controlled by anyone and it is neutral. Nobody controls the network and nobody can censor the system. This is unstoppable network of value. There are no other cryptocurrencies or projects with same results and features.
Bitcoin is slow
A classic objection is that bitcoin is slow and inefficient. And maybe it is. Infact bitcoin decentralized security is strong, but comes with apparent inefficiency and slowness.
However the concerns about speeds are important into payment systems. Bitcoin is not a payment system. Lightnining network is a payment system which was created on top of bitcoin. Basically side chains and layers can be built for different purposes in such a way they extend the bitcoin network itself. So bitcoin is the standard network, on top of which many additional features can be added. There is nothing that bitcoin can’t do where other cryptocurrencies instead are able to.
What about the price?
Price is very difficult to estimate because the bitcoin market is still small and volatility is always very high as sentiment is driven by fears. It’s easy to say, however, that bitcoin wants to become the new gold. Bitcoin infact has important properties for becoming the new gold: scarse, easy to move around the world, borderless, difficult to counterfeit, secure, easy to store, impossible to seize and blacklist and without any intermediary.
But it easy to see that if capitalization would arrive to gold’s one, it’s very likely that price can reach high price rates as 250k dollars and over in the next 5-10 years to come.
