What will Bitcoin look like in 20 years?

Where will Bitcoin go in 20 years? Will it end? Or will it explode? It is easy to come up with similar answers. But the future will never be black and white, it will always be full of various possibilities. It is ridiculous and irresponsible to simply make a judgment. Recently, an article appeared on Medium, the author is Daniel Jeffries, in which he made a well-reasoned prediction about the future development trend of Bitcoin. The prediction may be accurate or inaccurate. But every prediction he made is not groundless. They can all bring us inspiration.

Predicting the future is a tricky business because it's so easy to get it wrong.

But we still have to do it and find the right trend. Since it has been almost 10 years since the release of the Bitcoin white paper, I will use a 20-year time period to predict the evolution of Bitcoin, blockchain, some other cryptocurrencies and decentralization.

When I’m old and grey this post will probably seem either really silly or really brilliant.

I don’t really care though, I’m working on it anyway.

I will also go a little deeper than just saying “Bitcoin will be worth zero” or “Bitcoin will become a reserve currency and worth $1 million.” Without further ado, this is not something anyone can do.

I will look at how technology will transform, and how society will transform.

I have successfully predicted future trends and technologies in the past. But no one can predict the future with 100% accuracy. Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, predicted satellites, GPS, cloud computing, the Internet, and telecommuting, but by his own admission, he overestimated the importance of rockets. And even when a company offered him a prototype laptop, he failed to predict its importance.

Chaos theory tells us that predicting the future is impossible. But this is not entirely true.

We can never predict black swan events or completely unexpected technologies (try explaining computers and the internet to an 18th century farmer), but we can do a random sampling analysis of tomorrow and predict the prevailing winds.

Very few people do it well. In fact, most people are ridiculous at predicting the future, so before making predictions we need to understand why so we can try to avoid the same mistakes.

The Internet will never succeed

The first reason people fail to accurately predict the future is that they spend only five minutes researching before formulating their opinion.

This is not thinking.

This is very similar to the primitive lizard brain, which is completely incapable of understanding anything novel. It is only good at attacking, defending, finding food and shelter, and avoiding boredom. It is just a survival machine.

Unfortunately, many people spend almost their entire lives at this level, and when they say they see new trends and directions of development, their opinions are worthless.

The second main reason people make bad predictions about the future is that the future defies their understanding of the world. Think of a company like Kodak, which refused to anticipate the potential of digital film because it had been operating in the same model for a hundred years. They had every advantage, but they shrugged it off. They mistook the past for the future, and paid a heavy price when the market developments blew by. To see the future, you have to be able to step outside of your own world, forget about past successes, and step outside of your current fierce scope.

The third main reason people don’t see the future is that it challenges their established positions of power. This is why oligarch banker Jamie Dimon and a prince from a country that just allowed women to drive see Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a “fraud” or a “scam.”

They really can't see clearly because they are the main beneficiaries of the current system. They don't want to see it either. So they resist, even if it's unconscious. It's just a psychological defense mechanism. The rise of a new management style means that their position is threatened, and they feel scared.

Asking these people what they think about Bitcoin is like asking a taxi driver what he thinks about Uber, or what he thinks about horse-drawn carriages. Their opinions are worthless.

The fourth main reason people screw up their forecasts is that they mistake their view for reality. It’s just their view of the world as it is right now, which is already reality, and it’s often not the same thing as a forecast. One is the map, the other is the territory. Don’t mistake the map for the territory.

In 1995, Clifford Stoll of Newsweek published an infamous article declaring that the Internet was about to collapse and fail. Stoll wrote:

Visionaries saw a future of telecommuting, interactive libraries, and multimedia classrooms. They talked about electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Business and trade would move from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks would make government more democratic. Bullshit.

You might smile when you read this because you feel so superior. What an idiot! Who didn't see the Internet coming?

The answer is: almost no one.

In hindsight, this was a done deal.

I bet almost everyone is laughing at the poor guy. But even if they knew what the Internet was at the beginning, they wouldn't have seen it coming. They certainly didn't see the advent of Wikipedia, the rise of telecommuting, or the day when we'd buy everything from books to groceries on Amazon.

In fact, what’s most striking about the above statement isn’t how inaccurate it is, but how accurate it is on so many levels.

That's right.

Read this article and you will find that many of his predictions are incredible!

If you look back at Stoll’s view, it’s a pretty clear picture of what’s happening over the next 20 years. Take a look:

Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we will soon be buying books and newspapers directly over the Internet.

Stoll saw the future, he just refused to see it. If he had been able to see beyond his own vision, rather than interpreting and filtering what he saw, the essay would have gone down in history as the most forward-thinking and accurate piece of writing ever written. This brings us to our next reason.

The fifth reason people make mistakes is because they are very, very impatient.

To open with Stoll's article: After 20 years on the Internet, I'm confused.

Stoll has lived on the Internet for two decades, and it hasn’t revealed anything that surprises or blows his mind. It’s easy to assume that if nothing has happened for so long, then it never will.

The waiting is the hardest part. It takes patience to let things unfold.

Patience. Patience. Patience.

Creativity requires setbacks, failures, and tremendous perseverance. Once you expose your ideas to the rust, gravity, and friction of reality, things fall apart. No plan for survival can be made to stand up to the enemy. Reality is the grindstone that grinds you or sharpens your mind.

Things take time.

How long does the real innovation process take? A classic example comes from George de Mestral, the inventor of Velcro.

He first came up with the idea in 1941 when he was walking in the woods with his dog and saw a bunch of burrs stuck to his fur coat. From that time on, an incomplete idea took root in his mind for seven years. In 1948, he began to work on turning his idea into reality, and it took him ten years to get it into mass production.

And, when he started his own company in the late 1950s, he expected demand to be high.

But that didn't happen.

Five years later, in the 1960's, Velcro was used as a solution to the problem of getting astronauts into and out of space suits during the space program. Some of the rest of the world cared only about the problem, not the idea or ideology behind it. Soon, the ski industry took notice and applied it to boots.

The time period from initial idea to a well-functioning, profitable business is about twenty-five years.

Finally, before we get into our cryptocurrency predictions, we can also take a lesson from Stoll.

His biggest mistake is the sixth and final reason why people are blind to the future. He takes current inventions, pushes them forward, and imagines them as solutions to future problems. Wrong!

Today’s inventions solve only today’s problems. Future problems will require entirely new solutions.

In that article, Stoll mentioned that CD books will never replace physical books. He is right, reading on a CD with a crappy display will "tear" your retinas, which is a painful experience. But understanding this can help us understand what characteristics future solutions should have.

It’s almost impossible to know what form these solutions will take, but we can identify the characteristics of a solution so that we can recognize it when it emerges.

Let’s see how it works:

CDs were bulky. Monitors at the time had low resolutions and were hard to read. They hurt your eyes. Also, computers were large and hard to carry around. Even laptops were bricks that got really hot. Nobody wanted to read a damn thing.

But he failed to notice the shortcomings of physical books.

Physical books are also heavy. They’re made of trees! They can get damaged or broken easily. And you can’t carry as many books as you want when you’re carrying something heavy.

From there we can see that a good solution is:

• Super portable and lightweight.

• Have a clear display.

• Completely hide data storage from users.

• As easy to use as a book. Just open it and read.

• Protect the data so that if we lose or damage the data, we can recover it without having to buy it again.

• Allows you to carry a large number of books at the same time.

Of course, we now know the answer: Kindle and iPad.

Both are easy to use, completely hide the storage media, protect the data through networking, and are very easy on the user's eyes.

The solution starts with figuring out what went wrong, then coming up with the right solution to fix it and correctly defining what features we need for a better experience.

In summary, we have three principles to help us predict the future:

patience.

Observe, don’t interpret.

Don't graft today's solutions onto tomorrow's problems.

Well, let’s break out the crystal ball and take a peek into the fate of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Hopefully we have better luck than Stoll and this post won't make me look like an idiot in the future.

The rise of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and decentralization

We begin with a few simple predictions, then move on to some more complex and far-reaching ones, and finally discuss some controversial issues.

I’ll also include a confidence meter to give you an idea of ​​how strongly I feel about this scene.

1) The bubble bursts

People who are in and out of cryptocurrencies see it as a bubble that will burst, causing prices to plummet.

They were right. But so what? This is not the end of the story. This is just the beginning.

Right now we are in a state of extreme excitement. The potential is huge. We can almost experience the decentralized future. It’s just around the corner!

Of course, this is almost certainly not how it will end. The bubble will burst. Vitalik is right, 90% of tokens will fail.

But after the bubble bursts, the real future will emerge.

In 8 years of crypto experimentation, everyone was working on the rails of the future and we didn’t get much out of it except speculative trading and a few smart contracts. The applications were horrible and barely usable. Your nerves frayed when you pressed the “send” button to send $5,000 to someone over the network. Better hope you copied and pasted that address so your money didn’t disappear into thin air!

When the dot-com bubble burst, many of today’s largest companies’ stocks plummeted by 85%. Yet they survived. Amazon and Google continue to dominate the world.

The same thing happens in cryptocurrencies.

In this bloody battle, 10% of the projects will become tomorrow’s Amazon, Google, and Facebook, and perhaps even JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, not to mention future governments, such as digital direct democracy or liquid democracy.

Innovation is hard work. Not to mention you’re trying to create something that doesn’t even exist!

There are no guidelines, no working templates, no business models to copy. Nothing. You are on your own! Just you and your imagination. Of course, 90% of people and companies fail!

It doesn't matter.

Cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and triple entry accounting are probably the most important inventions of the past 500 years, so they won’t trickle in on that good night.

The bubble bursting is just the next step. Three years later, the technology will be truly mature and operational (note: it turns out that this wish is still in the process of being realized).

2) Government cryptocurrencies will flourish

The community isn't going to like this, but there's no doubt about it.

Many governments will not sit idly by and this will cause them to lose control of their money supply without a vicious battle. Anyone working on a project now should anticipate protocol-level attacks on decentralized cryptocurrencies and design some defenses to counter them.

There is a lot of work to be done to build a distributed, decentralized DDoS blocking network, such as Gladius, and we will discuss some additional defensive cryptographic techniques when I talk about the evolution of the protocol.

In the long run, governments will lose this war, probably between 30 and 100 years (perhaps sooner due to a war or financial crisis). But in 10 or 20 years, it is expected that government cryptocurrencies will be powerful and dominate the flow of money for many people around the world.

“No one will accept them!” some cryptocurrency diehards might scream.

But the average person has no understanding of what is truly important, and they don't see the need for privacy and security unless they are physically deprived of it in extreme circumstances like war. When soldiers invade your house and take all your belongings, the need for privacy becomes very real.

Remember that Snowden interview with John Oliver about government surveillance?

Look at the look on Snowden's face when he realizes that the average person on the street knows nothing about privacy and doesn't care. The only thing they care about is whether the government has photos of their private parts on file. Seriously.

People will adopt government cryptocurrencies without a second thought. They may even think it’s absolutely the right thing to do.

Of course, as Naval Ravikant points out, a blockchain controlled by a nation, a corporation, an elite, or a mob is nonsense.

They are meaningless because the purpose of blockchain is to distribute power throughout the system. By not allowing a single organization to arbitrarily control or change the rules, decentralized cryptography and applications provide a strong set of checks and balances to prevent harmful manipulation of the system.

When 5 different banks own a blockchain, it is not a blockchain, it is just a database. It is only when the banks, regulators, shareholders and the bank’s customers all have the keys to the blockchain at the same time and can cancel each other’s power, that is a real blockchain.

Checks and balances of power are the key!

A government cryptocurrency would represent a complete and utter perversion of this idea.

But it doesn't matter. They'll do it either way.

In fact, instead of distributing power, they may seek greater power, giving themselves the ability to track every citizen's spending and automatically collect taxes from wages and sales of goods and services. This is why authoritarian governments are racing to establish official cryptocurrencies. They can't wait to monitor the money in your pocket.

They will eliminate physical money, using one of three excuses:

• Fighting money laundering

• Stopping Terrorists

• Stop crime

Government cryptocurrencies will be a very, very bitter pill for current crypto faithfuls, but they better get used to them.

A better option is to assume the existence of a hybrid system of decentralized and centralized cryptocurrencies and design it now to avoid being swallowed by this "tsunami". It is better to transform the current system with blockchain and then overwhelm it from within, rather than ignore it or turn it into a hostile one.

3) Decentralized cryptocurrency will become a parallel economic operating system on Earth

The rise of centralized crypto doesn’t mean decentralized crypto will disappear. Oh, many governments will try, but in the end they won’t be able to kill them all. The reason is simple.

The same factors that make it hard for people to agree on a blockchain will also make it hard for the world's governments to agree on anything. They can't do it. Some governments will love decentralization, while others will hate it.

Even as some countries openly oppose them, many others will openly support decentralized cryptocurrencies, especially those that have suffered the most from the dominance of the U.S. dollar. Some Latin American countries, Singapore, Switzerland, and many Asian and African countries welcome decentralized cryptocurrencies with open arms.

If all countries disagree, then decentralized crypto will never go away, even centralized crypto will emerge.

But to stay relevant, decentralized crypto needs to move fast. They need a killer app. Right now they are vulnerable. To really take root, they need this killer app to spread globally. It has to be something so indispensable that people can’t imagine life without it.

In a previous post, I outlined one possible way this could happen, which is to gamify the distribution of revenue. But that’s just one way. There are many, many others. If you’re developing a platform today, know that it’s a race against time, and that centralized crypto systems will take root along the way.

4) Cryptocurrency’s killer app is not the browser

This is a classic case of grafting an old invention onto a new system. Brave Browser is great, and I bet I’d love it because it would pair with a universal payment system to automatically exchange cryptocurrencies, but I don’t think it’s the final interface to the blockchain. I think it’s probably an intermediate step.

So, what does a killer app look like?

I have no idea.

But I know it should be:

• Ubiquitous

• Easy to use

• It can be a privacy protection and information trading platform.

• Open Source

It’s also something new and original that expands on blockchain’s best features while minimizing its shortcomings.

Maybe a decentralized AI assistant or attention filter? There are all sorts of possibilities, so get moving!

5) Blockchain is just the beginning of decentralization

The blockchain system is just the first step in the decentralization mechanism.

People are already inventing new things, like IOTA’s Tangle and HashGraph.

It doesn't matter if both projects fail in the long run, because other projects will create another approach. This is almost certain.

Over the next twenty years, I predict dozens or even hundreds of experimental decentralized consensus protocols capable of transactional scale and augmented by AI systems.

It is very likely that none of these systems were designed by humans.

Instead, if AI is given a hundred years, they will iterate ideas very quickly and develop systems that no human can. They will take inspiration from nature and insects, plants, or other biological systems like proteins.

One or two of these systems will come to rule them all, becoming the meta-system that rules them all, unifying the many different kinds of cryptocurrencies and running the entire system like a giant fractal within which countless sub-networks can thrive.

6) Cryptocurrency will become easier to use

The user experience of today’s cryptocurrency systems is terrible.

If I type something wrong, or copy and paste something wrong, my money is gone forever; if there is a software glitch, my money is gone forever; if someone hacks into my computer or phone, my money is gone forever…

See the trend? Make any mistake and you're screwed. It's like riding a motorcycle on the edge of a cliff with no guardrails.

The core wallet is extremely difficult to use. When I last upgraded Ethereum, it forgot to keep my private keys, so I had to restore them all. Earlier this year, I had an old Bitcoiner that was stuck on an ancient version of Multibit from 2013. It took me a week to free it because the software mistakenly thought I sent a transaction that never actually played out.

Imagine, will these wallets still be usable in five years? What happens when quantum computers emerge and we need to completely update the fundamental protocols that underpin the system?

The average person will never be able to complete these steps. Zero chance. 20 years in IT has taught me that people can and will screw up their machines in ways that the techs can never imagine. Murphy's Law in action.

Worse, you can’t reverse any trades, and there is no way to make it so it doesn’t make mistakes. I predict there will be many algorithms that will freeze, roll back, protect trades, and how to do self-custody of funds and recover stolen money.

Only systems that provide all the functionality of the old systems plus entirely new features will achieve mass adoption.

Think again of CD-ROM books from the 80s. They had lots of new features like diagrams and color, and you could back them up.

But that’s not good enough, because CDs have fatal flaws. In his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil calls this the “pretender” stage of evolution. The new technology has some advantages, but too many disadvantages to succeed and displace the old.

It wasn't until the advent of the Kindle and iPad that e-book readers took off, combining all the old features of physical books, such as portability and ease of reading, with some new features, such as the ability to carry a thousand books at once.

Crypto must follow a similar path from fatal flaws to untold new powers for people and businesses to achieve its dominance.

I also see a lot of systems where we really need to pass on cryptocurrency to your children, and for that we need to form pawn shops where necessary, or algorithmic banks, and decentralized cloud or fog services that act as the final arbitrator.

Simply splitting up your keys and giving them to trusted friends or loved ones is not enough. That will be the first solution to go. Friends may stop being friends, and people will divorce or die or worse. We need something better, something fully automated.

Think about how difficult it is to pass your Bitcoin to someone you love right now. What if you died tomorrow, or hit your head, and forgot your password?

Even if you plan for it, it can suck.

You need to create a will, lock your private keys and a backup of your wallet in a safe, give the password to a lawyer and hope he doesn't steal it, or that the USB stick or Trezor/Nano doesn't die. You can also create a multi-signature wallet with some friends and family and hope someone doesn't backdoor or bug check into a different version on Github and screw it up. All of this is immature. It's unacceptable.

By the way, if you want to start a cryptocurrency business that everyone needs, you need to think about solving the inheritance issue. At that point, everyone will be happy to pay you.

I predict that smart contracts and AI will automatically generate wills. Essentially, the blockchain itself will be the bank and customer service department, which may use your biometric markers and a third-party verification group, or a decentralized AI, to verify your loved ones, and can also be automatically triggered in the event of your death, at which time automatic password and key recovery will cease.

Whatever it looks like, we need control at the algorithmic level so that we can give our money to whoever we want it to be, and it can’t be robbed or stolen. We also need the system to protect us from accidents, death, and madness.

7) Cryptocurrency protocols will be extracted from the cryptocurrency itself

Currently, all cryptocurrencies in existence are inextricably linked to their protocols.

I hope we can abstract away the protocols for exchanging, sending and receiving as well as protecting, saving and storing our cryptocurrency.

This will mirror the evolution of today's servers from bare metal to virtualization to containers to serverless.

First, most cryptocurrencies don’t scale. We can’t even achieve visa-level transaction processing on the blockchain, the holy grail of crypto and the subject of much debate. Bitcoin can peak at 7 transactions per second.

Some even see this as a virtue of cryptocurrency, as it encourages people to save and store money rather than send it out.

This is ridiculous.

We should be able to move as much of this money as quickly as possible.

Let's face it, the 1MB limit is nothing more than a defense against hackers. Originally, Bitcoin had no limit. Then, Satoshi quietly shoved it in overnight, without mentioning it or explaining it in the source code. It was most likely just a stupid way to prevent DDoS attacks.

We can and will come up with better protections.

Are you a 1MB fan? What about SegWit2X's 2MB? Maybe you'll move to a Bitcoin Cash blockchain with an 8MB limit?

Wrong. All of this is wrong and ridiculous.

According to the Lightning Network folks, if we had seven billion people doing just two transactions a day, it would take:

24 GB blocks, 3.5 TB/day, 1.27 PB/year

We need to think differently and evolve to design real solutions. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies must change if they want to survive. When quantum computers come knocking, with better speed and innovation, it will be easy to integrate new defense systems and update encryption algorithms.

We can’t just rest on Satoshi’s vision and assume he thought of everything.

But he didn't.

Let's be honest, who gave Satoshi the idea? He had already left the project. If he really wanted to bootstrap it, he probably would have stayed on Linux like Linus did. But he didn't. He left it for the rest of us to figure out.

So let's actually start doing this.

One approach would be to abstract all of the protocols and run all of old Bitcoin into a virtual machine or container. Then, the rules are separate from Bitcoin itself.

This is just one way, but to truly become a breakthrough technology, blockchain needs real innovation.

Either way, people need to think fast or the CryptoRuble will overtake us while we’re still arguing about 1MB vs 2MB.

We also need to do this as it will become necessary to defend against protocol level attacks from hostile actors and APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats). The NEM architecture is a good start as it includes firewalls etc for node protection.

But it needs to go further to stop more insidious and devastating attacks, and it can't take four years to implement a solution.

The best solution may be to download external security rule chains to all nodes in the network, which act as intrusion detection, firewalls, and protocol inspectors, along with AI-based automatically evolving rule sets and countermeasures.

Think of ICE from Neuromancer.

8) We will have four major meta-cryptocurrencies, plus fifty to a hundred minor cryptocurrencies, and unlimited virtual variations of those cryptocurrencies, plus national cryptocurrencies

Now we are making cryptocurrencies for everything.

Have an identity platform like Civic? Make a cryptocurrency.

Creating a decentralized DNS? Become a cryptocurrency and ICO!

Building a dumb app on a blockchain? You need a cryptocurrency, my friend!

You don’t actually need cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrencies will start to emerge in different meta-categories. At this point, I can only see four types of Bitcoin, blockchain (or blockchain technology) that can be seamlessly switched to consumer services as needed:

• Cryptocurrency for fighting deflation

• A deflationary cryptocurrency for users

• Behavior Tokens

• Reward Tokens

Deflationary cryptocurrencies are meant to be hoarded and invested in. Their value rises over time and benefits savers. Everyone needs such an investment, which is why Bitcoin was created in the first place.

An inflationary cryptocurrency that mirrors the movement of the dollar. No one likes spending Bitcoin to buy a flat screen TV because a few years later, as the price of Bitcoin rises, they actually spent $175,000. We need a stable, spendable cryptocurrency. Think of this as the classic "store of value" that Paul Krugman always complains about, and know that we really need these things to buy and sell everyday goods.

Action tokens are for actions on the network that should always be free, like voting or sending a text message. These are not microtransactions. There shouldn’t be a cost to reset your password on something. As the EOS folks say, “If you go to Amazon and it costs 3 cents to load a page, no one is going to load the page.”

Reward tokens are used to incentivize good behavior and punish bad behavior.

You can use these four cryptocurrencies to build the ultimate universe system. Any other cryptocurrency can be a subcomponent with different metadata of these cryptocurrencies.

9) We will learn economics bullshit that we don’t know

Are you a Keynesian or a follower of the Austrian free market?

The answer might be, who cares?

All of our economic theories are based on limited data from the industrial era. As we experiment with new economic systems in the coming years, all current economic theories will prove to be no more than cave paintings.

That’s what these new cryptocurrencies are made of: microeconomic systems at war.

This is Darwinian economics.

Some basic laws of economics will still hold true, but many will fall by the wayside. That’s because, with blockchains taking over, we’ll have real-time economic data on a global scale, not just a bunch of guesswork done with pencil and paper a hundred years ago.

As AI tracks statistics around the world in real time, we will be able to see the actual impact of a country enacting a steel tariff. We will track global production and manufacturing with incredible precision, and it will surprise us in so many wonderful ways.

10) There will be DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) that grow into Fortune 500 companies

The DAO most likely to reach this milestone is one that mirrors an open version of Visa, as it would likely take a cut of transactions and miners on the most dominant network, which would help fund future development and governance of that network.

Rather than hoarding all the funds, it would flow through smart contracts to other businesses and DAOs, as well as to national and local governments or other non-governmental entities that benefit the network.

To do this, DAOs must evolve.

Now we think of a DAO as a smart contract. That’s far from it.

The DAO will need AI to help manage and mitigate its ruleset, and it will need to be able to automatically generate templated governance models. Governance is everything in a DAO, and there is no good scalable model to do this at scale right now. Make it an open source, meritocratic workplace. Early DAOs failed because they had what I call the "brave new world" problem.

Everyone thinks they are the boss and no one thinks to take the trash away.

When everyone is king of the DAO, it’s hard to order a paper clip.

To function effectively, a team needs role players and stars. People also have to understand their role and accept it, even if it changes later, as they build strengths and experience in the system.

Just like in an enterprise environment, it can be hard to manage. How do you fire a person who doesn’t work in a DAO? How do you make sure that the person responsible for ICO security is actually qualified, rather than just being elected because everyone likes him?

Automated enterprises and nonprofit architectures of the future will have to develop incredible tools for changing management and decision-making methods, as well as operating protocols that run like code.

11) The gig economy will develop well

People in World War II will have one or two jobs in their lifetime. Today we will have five or six jobs per person.

People tomorrow will have five or six jobs at the same time.

Half of these revenues will be automated and passive, most likely some kind of crypto UBI (National Basic Income). We will also see the rise of AI matching job services. Machines will know your abilities and skills and match jobs for you so you don’t have to find a job.

Imagine a software project that requires a lot of code, like a hundred trillion lines. Software projects will only become more complex and continue to grow. Artificial intelligence will write and test half of it, but people will write the other half. This project will be fed into a distributed, decentralized system that can split the work into parts and analyze it, and like a project manager, handing the work to programmers around the world (based on their reputation and skills).

You can think of it as a Github that combines AI with UpWork and Mechanical Turk systems.

It can play a role in manufacturing and various blue-collar jobs.

The artificial intelligence of Hong Kong Metro is perhaps the first prototype of such networks, even if it is not a perfect analogy. It predicts what failures will happen to the subway and gives engineers a lead. This brings up to 99% of the uptime of the world's busiest subway.

A large portion of this will be managed by external Reputation Banks, which are powered by blockchain and, like the scene in the Black Mirror, will become the cornerstone of social credit for tomorrow.

It will be a double-edged sword.

Social Credit in the Black Mirror

The main challenge is that few people can agree on good and bad in a system, and ideology tends to distort these concepts into unrecognizable confusion. It would be very easy to create a rule set that enslaves us all if we are not careful.

The focus of controversy

I just made some simple predictions. Now, let's discuss some issues that may cause heated debate.

12) Blockchain will bring all kinds of evil

Enthusiasts of cryptotech will have to accept the fact that blockchain can and will bring as much evil as possible.

Nothing is good or bad. Everything exists in a continuum. You can kill someone with a gun, but you can also go hunting to feed your family. Water can sustain life, but it can also flood you and even poison you.

If you are designing a system in "fast and breaking" DevOps, you just need to know that this is likely a disaster for systems that can manage many aspects of our lives through algorithms.

Instead, you should slow down, think about it, and don't mess up things.

You should start thinking about all the ways to destroy your system, otherwise you will not be able to resist it when it gets out of control. If you don't imagine a hostile force that will take advantage of the power of blockchain, then you're too naive.

I once wrote an article titled "What if Hitler owns a blockchain?". Frankly, I don't want to publish it because I don't want to give those bad guys any fresh ideas, but rest assured that it may not matter. Their "blackhearts" are already trying to think about how to use blockchain as a system of suppression and control.

Here, I deliberately ambiguity to avoid putting all of these ideas into the collective unconscious. But think about the fact that digitalization will track every aspect of your life, from where you go, what you do, statistical predictions of your behavior, and design behavioral algorithms designed to motivate you to follow ideology, and finally even take into account unbreakable digital rights management and total genocide.

Genocide?

yes.

Don't forget that IBM helped the Nazis track victims with perforated cards and helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust.

What can they do with blockchain? Answer: We can only start to imagine more terrible atrocities now.

Maybe you would think that an open system can always prevent abuse?

Wrong.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it is that open systems tend to be centralized, and centralized has enough time to destroy any system and achieve its own goals.

If you are working on encryption technology, you haven't thought about all the ways to abuse passwords? Then there's a good chance you're not designing a system that saves the world, but creating a prison for it.

13) Bitcoin's survival chance is 50%

Most true believers won’t like this, but to be honest, here the possibility of 50/50 is really high.

First of all, I hope and support Bitcoin to survive. But we still need to look at this issue objectively and see the difficulties it faces.

Bitcoin has a first-mover advantage. It says some cryptocurrencies occupy the first place and still dominate global market share, but it also faces some major flaws that could lead to its demise.

Basically, it is the Model T (Ford's earliest car) of the blockchain revolution.

How many more Model T can you see on the street today?

Can you transform a Model T to make it like a Lamborghini? Can you add complex electronics to it and make it a Tesla that can drive autonomously? No.

First, Bitcoin does not have a built-in governance mechanism. This is a key flaw. There are only a few ways to change this. The first is to submit a proposal that almost everyone agrees with, which, as we saw on SegWit, is very difficult. It took four years to be adopted.

The second step is to start a new project and “hard fork” it. This may be the only way to finally achieve this. A team might fork it and build governance mechanisms in it, but it will take a long time to try.

A well-designed, widely distributed, built-in governance cryptocurrency will have a huge advantage over Bitcoin and can easily replace Bitcoin as it makes upgrades more seamless and smooth.

It only takes hours or days to deal with attacks from well-funded hostile forces to quickly penetrate the entire network, rather than years.

How to scale? We've discussed this issue. Changing the size of a block doesn't cut it. This requires some more radical measures.

What if some hostile forces decide to bring all core developers together? How easy would it be to replace them, given the current severe shortage of talent related to encryption?

These are just some almost insurmountable problems. I pointed out these just to make everyone think about it. If you can really find the problem, you can find a solution. But if we only deal with fake problems like block size limits, we will get nothing.

Bitcoin is a beautiful and wonderful idea that has changed the world. It won’t fail because of fraud or a scam, but only because of its own hard-coded rules, infighting and lack of governance.

Of course, it doesn't necessarily fail. We can now start thinking about how to survive it.

As I mentioned earlier, some kind of virtualization or containerization advancement can allow Bitcoin to adapt and evolve by migrating to an abstract set of protocols and defense systems, which will help ensure that Bitcoin can not only survive but also thrive.

The best way to make sure it survives is to understand what it can fail, all, real reasons and start designing real solutions for these problems so that when they do come, we are ready.

Conclusion

I've left some bad ideas in this article because I don't want to see them appear. If someone thinks about this and goes to do it, there's nothing I can do.

Cryptocurrencies represent a fundamental upgrade to the world’s economic system. Once they are fully launched and integrated into the future global or interstellar network, the world will be very different from what we understand.

Hundreds of years later, today's economy looks like the feudal economy of the past.

Cryptocurrencies, decentralized applications, and DAOs may even bring us into a scene like Star Trek, like post-scarce economies, but that takes time.

I don't think the singularity will accelerate tomorrow. But it may not be reality. So, what will this bring to us?

Cryptotech can be good or evil, like everything in life.